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.

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.

Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

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