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.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

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.

We don't know our own story.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.