All The New Thinking Is About Loss.

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 Enchantment.

Poetry, When It Takes Sides, When It Proposes Solutions, Isn't Any Smarter Than Anybody Else.

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 No Access To Jobs And Is Resentful And Furiously Angry, We Can Have It - That's What We've Been Willing To Pay For So Far.

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 Always Going Into Dead Abstraction.

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 Terms Of Relative Size Of Audience And Other Things, Exactly Who Readers Were.