Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.