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.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

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