I think that’s what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Learning to live what you’re born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don’t have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that’s terrific.

I’m passing on a tradition of which I am part. There’s a long line of poets who went before me, and I’m another one, and I’m hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

So, I’ve never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don’t want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I’ll try to tell you where I’m coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive.

I’m perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it’s all women. I always think it’s kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let’s start reforming it.