I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

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.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

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

We don't know our own story.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.