Having financial independence does not increase one's chances of independent, artistic creation whatsoever. Our conditioned behavior toward mimicry for the sake of market forces is an amazing syndrome. The watchtowers guide us well.

One can say that the disaffection is still a lingering naiveté about, not the place of poetry in the world, but - how to say this - the moral and intellectual presence of poets in the world. And while this may seem an old conversation to many poets who roll their eyes and say, "Here we go again about the function of poetry," I think that conversation, about poetry as an engaged art in a world that is full of regression or still lacking in progress, is still really not well-developed. It's almost an avoided conversation.

Even the art of quoting is a conservative art most of the time, in order to propel the same ideas and the same self-congratulatory importance.

For me, poetry is a form of activism. And that word enables the labelers, and also gives them a rash.

The more money you make, the more the culture already attracts you to serve it, with an aura of glitter and power, to reproduce it in even stronger ways. And you have to resist that so much if any meaningful artistic integrity is to be had.

I have a problem with the fact that when it's brought up, it's not really discussed. It's all that's brought up. So-and-so is an Arab American or a Palestinian or Muslim or a doctor with or without borders and there's really no meaningful entry into those hyphenations.

Since so much of the poetry machine is consumed in and with the mirroring and the reproduction of what is already preexistent, I don't understand why such paranoiac conservatism is dedicated to labels. It's a way of controlling the "other," to label them.