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 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.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

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.