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,….

I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how ….

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of ….

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….

[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, ov….

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly..

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism..

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it….

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the uni….

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a prin….

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to ….

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory….

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 ….

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, tu….

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter..

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time..

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew….

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists..

It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a….

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. I….