If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in posses….

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and ….

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

I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and educati….

My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well….

[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces..

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 ….

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

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did..

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not..

[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the ….

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

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are..

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

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vag….

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explana….

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll….

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else..

They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ….

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists..

A word is elegy to what it signifies..