The political and social struggle for civil rights itself can transform the outsider into a citizen. - Shirley Geok-lin Lim

The sooner you learn that you have to be independent, that you are alone, and if there are people to help you it's a blessing, but it's not a given-I think this is the beginning of strength and wisdom.

(What does that say about the creative process of poetry?) I suppose it is an example of the inexplicability of the creative process. It works through ordinary feelings, familiar relationships, even when it sets itself a grand or historical challenge. But it seizes on what is hidden from everyday view, the strangeness in our dailiness that we need to make meaning of or for. The creative process is uncanny. It remains unknowable because it works with the not yet known. As for the conditions that support creativity, I know what I need as a poet. I need time-quiet time-and pen and paper.

"Lament" is in some ways a praise song, a love poem to the English language, which, together with other languages like Spanish and Chinese, I continue to view as a wonderful achievement of the human species. The English language is capable of overcoming the separate identities that divide us even as it sometimes is deployed in erecting those separations.