Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

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.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.

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.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.