[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.