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.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

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

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

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