I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

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

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

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

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.