I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

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

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.