It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.