When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

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

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

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

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.