We don't know our own story.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.