Richard Meltzer

No matter what, I'm never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology.…

— Richard Meltzer

When you make it to eighty-four, then you're ready to sit back and think universal and systematic. I was a philosophy major…

— Richard Meltzer

Basically, I've reached the point where I've lost any direct relationship to any of the editors I used to have. I suspect…

— Richard Meltzer

I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an…

— Richard Meltzer

But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy,…

— Richard Meltzer

Those which might have some depth are corny enough to be hokey, and almost hokey enough to be folky, since folky is…

— Richard Meltzer

My issues with it are that simply in terms of my own work. It represents 30 years of output. And some of…

— Richard Meltzer

“Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yougurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain,…

— Richard Meltzer

If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would…

— Richard Meltzer

One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually…

— Richard Meltzer

If I'm very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was…

— Richard Meltzer

And the whole online thing is like, I just, that to me is a world that doesn't exist. It's not something you…

— Richard Meltzer

Basically, when I hear it now, I don't recognize myself directly in a lot of cases. I was expecting more menace. And…

— Richard Meltzer

I didn't mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I…

— Richard Meltzer

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started…

— Richard Meltzer

The first five years as a writer, I didn't know how to write at all. I couldn't write my way out of…

— Richard Meltzer