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.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

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.