I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry..

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

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language..

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's p….

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they ide….

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

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

Poems come from incomplete knowledge..

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

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

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrif….

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

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting whe….

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to ….

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a….

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read ….

What line breaks add to prose prosody is a connection between eye and ear which emphasizes the nature of the language by ... creating units of in….

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….

Innocence is suffering and the loss of that innocence is something to fear..

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for….

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos..