Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

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.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.