The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.