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.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

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.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.