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.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

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.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

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