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.

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.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

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.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.