Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.

I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.

Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.

I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

Meanwhile, the disgruntled "natives" of the West remain empty-handed and keep baying for blood, stuck on the caboose of the train, like Bob Dylan used to sing. Despair will always be a merchandize so long as we refuse to confront these lies head-on.

In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.