We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Poetry Is Not a Luxury. Crossing Press, 1984.
Poetry is an absolute necessity of our living because it delineates . . .
We must first examine our feelings for questions, because all the rest has been programmed. We have been taught how to understand, and in terms that will insure not creativity, but the status quo. If we are looking for something which is new and something which is vital, we must look first into the chaos within ourselves. Now whether poetry has the responsibility to effect social change . . . it doesn't really matter. As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable, in our lives, they become more and more intolerable.