Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

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.

There are either poems about sex/love or God.

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.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

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.