As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

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 that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

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.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.