I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?