Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

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

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

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

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.