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

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

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.

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