Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.