The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. T….

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their informati….

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous..

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 thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Cana….

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills a….

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns ou….

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others..

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day..

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets..

The Earth forgives the previous year every year..

In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at….

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in ter….

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onloo….

It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great id….

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet..

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a….

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation..

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private scho….

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free..

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….