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

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?