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's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

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

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking