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?

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.

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

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

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.