It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman.

America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism.

Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.