The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.