My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

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

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.