Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

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.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.