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.

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.

A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony.

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.

I don't think art is in danger of dissolution or disappearance, and we don't trust enough in its ability and power to create critical consciousness as much as we think we do.