I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

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

We don't know our own story.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

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

I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.