I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

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.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

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.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

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.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.