Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.

Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.

We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.