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.
“I had never seen war, or even talked about it at length with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of violence, and so believed that war would be no more than a new experience for me, as other things… had been new experiences. War is not a new experience; it is a new world… Even its geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities.”
Gene Wolfe