Ruth L. Schwartz		The African-American poet Audre Lorde once said that she wrote "in order to find out what I didn't know I knew." The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda spoke of how poets must move through the world, "step by step among things and beings... never isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind expansion of love." Together, these two poets, who wrote in the same century but were separated by almost every other factor we have been taught to believe defines us -- continent, native language, race, gender and sexual orientation -- have expressed essential pieces of what poetry is for me. I write to record what I see around me, and what I discover inside myself -- and to transform it. Both of these acts, the recording and the transformation, require me to look closely, then more closely, and then to look again. Ultimately, this quality of really seeing -- no matter what it is focused upon -- seems to me to be almost indistinguishable from love. I have written poetry more or less continuously for 20 years now, and I continue to be awed by its ability to contain all the "things and beings" my life brings me: the violence, loneliness and despair of urban America in our time, the irremediable tenuousness of life in a mortal body -- and the invincible, astonishing affirmation of the natural world, and the endlessly redemptive power of eros and love. -- Ruth L. Schwartz