For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.