My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.