Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.