We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.