If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

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

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.