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.

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

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.

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.

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.