Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

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.

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.

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.