Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

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.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

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.

What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.