I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.