The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.