If I Cling To Circumstances I Could

Our Personalities Seem Dangerously To Blur And Overlap With Our Mother's; And, In A Desperate Attempt To Know Where Mother Ends And Daughter Begins, We Perform Radical Surgery.

We Move But Our Words Stand Become Responsible For More Than We Intended And This Is Verbal Privilege

Poetry Is The Liquid Voice That Can Wear Through Stone.

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. Most Of Them, Though Not All, Arewhite And Male. But Even As American Society Is Unravelling, Becoming More Violent And Punitive, Wonderful Political Poetshave Been Emerging.

Whatever Is Unnamed, Undepicted In Images, Whatever Is Omitted From Biography, Censored In Collections Of Letters, Whatever Is Misnamed As Something Else, Made Difficult-to-come-by, Whatever Is Buried In The Memory By The Collapse Of Meaning Under An Inadequate Or Lying Language - This Will Become, Not Merely Unspoken, But Unspeakable.