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.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

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

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.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.