As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out..

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like ….

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed..

What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line o….

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on….

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-dow….

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old da….

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - prac….

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us..

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Con….

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoo….

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school..

I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other real….

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the hea….

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the….

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published..

You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean….

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not….

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are alway….

What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thin….

I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty pe….