From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

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

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

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

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.