I talked about what had happened in my country and the horrible assassination of Monsignor Romero. And soon after that, my cousin, Vides Casanova, th… - Claribel Alegría Vides

Among my generation in Central America, women of the leisure class had the option of marrying or controlling their husband’s purse strings or of remaining chaste and virtuous, baking cakes for their nieces and nephews.

poetry to me is something sacred. If you want to be a poet, it’s very difficult. You have to listen to that voice, follow that voice. Never put poetry to the service of anything. No! We are at the service of poetry, and you have to read a lot to feed off of other poets. You have to get fed by other poets, to write all the time, even if it’s one line a day. You have to be disciplined and humble.

The art and the reality is very difficult sometimes to reconcile, but also I don’t think that the poet have to be in an ivory tower just thinking beautiful thoughts, you know, when there are so much horrible in — ‘mid you, you know, outside you. And then I think you have to go and look at that and feel it and suffer with the others and make that suffering useful.