When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

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.