A word is elegy to what it signifies.

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.

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.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

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.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.