“I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.”

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

I came to explore the wreck.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.

In order to find reality, each must search for his own universe, look for the details that contribute to this reality7 that one feels under the surface of things.

Maybe it will all become one big thing, with smart, talented people who love a thing, helping each other be better.

There is no possibility of a public demonstration [in Iran] of such defiance, but these defiant acts are certainly going on.

Behind each door we shake is a reality.

There was no reason to call or write letters. As it would have been meaningless, if we couldn’t hold each other tight.

I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

Don’t just give up, Hachiko. Life is about getting knocked down over and over, but still getting up each time. If you keep getting up, you win.