Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about 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.