American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.