We Have To Embrace The Good Over

Cursing Themselves In Ragged Dreamsfire Has Singed The Edges Of,they Know A Slow Dying The Fields Have Come To Terms With.shimmering Fans Work Against The Heat& Smell Of Gunpowder, Making Moneyfloat From Hand To Hand. The Next Momenta Rocket Pushes A White Fistthrough Night Sky, & They Scatter Like Birds& Fall Into The Shape Their Liveshave Become.

I Excavate History. I Look At Lives Buried Under Too Much Silence. Periods Of Time, Like Slavery, Have To Be Revisited, Reimagined, So We Can Move Through Them.

Students Often Have Such A Lofty Idea Of What A Poem Is, And I Want Them To Realize That Their Own Lives Are Where The Poetry Comes From. The Most Important Things Are To Respect The Language; To Know The Classical Rules, Even If Only To Break Them; And To Be Prepared To Edit, To Revise, To Shape.

There's A Sameness About American Poetry That I Don't Think Represents The Whole People. It Represents A Poetry Of The Moment, A Poetry Of Evasion, And I Have Problems With This. I Believe Poetry Has Always Been Political, Long Before Poets Had To Deal With The Page And White Space . . . It's Natural.

Poets Are Seen As The Caretakers Of Language, So Working With Words No Matter What The Form Is What We Do.