There are either poems about sex/love or God..

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and ….

It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of g….

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining ….

Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off….

There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek ….

If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and….

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go ar….

Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have….

After Pope, in the beginning of Romanticism, people developed the idea that imagination rather than reason was a special form of knowledge and its be….

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too.

When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going o….

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagi….

I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than en….

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write..

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills..

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry..

We don't know our own story..

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read..

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent..

Writing is an incessant process of discovery..