To be an ‘American poet’ is a choice, one that I personally made three decades ago when I pondered the alternatives between leaving a United States that was then engaging in an openly imperialist war in Indochina and staying, which meant resisting the draft and risking imprisonment.
“In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.”
Don Delillo