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.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

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

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.