Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.