I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

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.

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.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.