“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

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.

Love is the language of the soul when it is not colored by emotion, ego, or attachment.

Our language and symbols are always incomplete versions of a greater reality.

I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places.

But we’ve got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it’s about being human.

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.

Language is the light of the mind.

The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols.

Before we had mouths or language or hope, we still had love. I know it’s not much. But my god, it’s beautiful and on so many days it is enough.