When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

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

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

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.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

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 record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.