Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

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.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too