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

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.

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.

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

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.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.