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.

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

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.

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.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.