A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

The very essence of school is elitism. Schools exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less.

In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian.

The fact is that some people are better than others - smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.

No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.

A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.