When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

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.

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

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.