Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

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