Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.
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.
I don't want to help a politician revise the truth.
Believe women first. I think this is very important. We must believe women first, and if the evidence truly stacks against them - in a significant way, not just a minor way - then revise our position.
At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.
Only in your imagination can you revise.
I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
