I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

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.

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

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."

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.