My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

We don't know our own story.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

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.