This interview reflects the “rebellious wisdom” of Ana Castillo, a Xicanista, strongly committed to her community and beliefs, who constantly challenges the limitations of the apparent. Her writing captures the critical vision that emerges from both her questioning spirit and the politicization of her experience, offering a powerful query of the social reality in which she lives. As such, Castillo’s The Guardians speaks, representing a cry for social justice and making visible a reality that many refuse to see.

Moss’s professional success is a victory over a childhood that contained beauty but also extraordinary pain. She grew up in Cleveland, the precocious and adored only child of Calvin and Florida Brasier, a tire recapper and a maid. Her father created the name Thylias because "he decided I needed a name that hadn’t existed before."

DS: How do you recognize students' unique talents and help them focus on those talents?

TM: "Talent" is something that I mistrust, so I don't think that I even recognize it.  Recognizing something doubted may not be possible, but even if I do recognize something that would want me to call it talent, I would probably ignore it. 

Did you write Stag's Leap in the white heat of the moment or are these emotions recollected in tranquility?

I have always written when the feeling is high. I'd find it hard to recollect extreme emotion in tranquility.

Were any poems too personal to include?

The only thing that made me leave out poems was the feeling they weren't good enough. I wrote hundreds – most didn't work.

Did you show your ex-husband the collection before publication?

The woman many regard as America's greatest living poet lives in a sprawling Upper West Side apartment where, for the past 40 years, she has written in a rocking chair overlooking the Hudson. When she gives a reading, people queue around the block to hear her - the night before we meet, so many fans turned up that they had to crouch on the floor and on window-sills.

Joshua B. Nelson: In your mind, what makes War Dances what it is? It seems to be doing something that not very many people are doing stylistically, in terms of form.

EWR: How was your experience guest starring on The Simpsons?

Robert Pinsky: The show is very well written, and performed by superb vocal actors. The literary, cultural and political allusions tend to have engaging backspin. So supplying the voice for my character—a poet with my name and some of my attributes, but a jerk—was a large challenge.

Guernica: When and how did you get into poetry? When did you write your first poem?

Robert Pinsky: What I got into was art, even before I could use the word “art.” My daydreams always have involved making something: a building, the design of some object, a picture, a dance, a song, a movie, a story.

You once went to the Letterman Show with some friends. Was it a negative experience?

The interview took place at Violi's Putnam Valley, New York home in May 2004

Martin Standard: How do you look back on thirty years of doing this, of doing this "poetry life" - both in terms of your life as a whole, and how the poetry has developed over that time. I know it's a big question.