Occupation: Poet Birth: August 3, 1937
I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American trad….
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way..
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did..
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….
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….
Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it..
Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life..
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this..
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry..
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 write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was..
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….
American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos..
Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language..
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….
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….
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 ….
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground..
Poems come from incomplete knowledge..
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….
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….