Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.

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

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.