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.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.