"Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?