You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

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.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.