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

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.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

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.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

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.