I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.