Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

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

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.