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.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

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.

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