"Early in our marriage my husband gave me The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Harvard University Press. What an amazement to see her poems in her own hand, intact in their radical, astonished beauty without the many editorial interventions made after her death which silently “corrected” and altered her grammar, idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, and much else. I could even see the alternate word-choices she left on the page—that feeling of the mind in motion. Recently, New Directions published The Gorgeous Nothings, which beautifully reproduces her late envelope writings and includes as well a photo of the small pencil she carried in the pocket of her dress—another book to treasure"

"There’s so much great stuff in the Song Poems catalogue, but Rod Keith is a favourite of mine. Everybody has their own favourite catalogue, but ‘Little Rug Bug', that song was great. All the songs with Rodd Keith doing the chamberlain thing with a pretend orchestra on a chamberlain are amazing. It’s a keyboard with string samples built into it. It’s like a Melotron. You kind of hear it on ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Flying’ on Magical Mystery Tour. It just has an unreal quality to it, with an orchestra that’s just on some fuckin' weird boogie-woogie drug. It’s like Harry Merry in a way. It just sounds like a malfunctioning pre-set."

"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"Previously known as the 21st Birthday Album, this is a gorgeous and goofy compilation of 45 fun and experimental electronic tone poems made for radio and TV from 1958 to 1979, some from the days when the music department only allowed the Workshop to exist by pretending electronic music wasn't music (just as Forbidden Planet was scored with "electronic tonalities"). So since no one was being taken seriously, the composers could even be women, of whom Delia Derbyshire has recently gained acclaim (in electronic-music geek circles; if you're not in one, it's not too late to join!). The longest track, 'A Whisper from Space', is 2:11; so if something doesn't grab you, wait a minute. If only all records could be this varied and entertaining. Derbyshire's immortal Dr. Who theme isn't even necessarily the best track. "