A word is elegy to what it signifies.

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

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.