Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.