I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

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 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.

There are either poems about sex/love or God.