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

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Strangers are an endangered species.