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.

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.

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.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

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

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.