I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

Critics called me 'egregious' - I had to look that one up - and 'creepy', but now I don't read them, I weigh them.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

I had to fight my whole life to break out of my circumstances. That's just part of my makeup.

I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me.

Sometimes, we are dealing with our own troubles and feel that we don't have the resources to help one another. Or simply, we just don't know what to do.

If you change nothing, nothing changes.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.