Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

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

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.

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