Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

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

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.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.