Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

Interviewer: Comment about the current trajectory of contemporary American poetry. In your opinion, what ways do you see it changing and/or evolving?

Dorianne Laux: I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future. I guess what I can see from my limited perspective is that since the Illiad was written down in 750 BCE, poetry of every kind has survived every war, every holocaust, every natural disaster, and every cruelty, repression, ignorance and every critic that was ever born, and is still alive and flourishing in the 21st century. The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family we've come to know as rose, and it remains, as it will for all time, a single voice crying out from the wilderness saying, "We were here."