Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death

Imagination Runs Through The Places Where We Live Like Water. We Need Both Things-a Living Knowledge Of The Land And A Live Imagination Of It And Our Place In It- If We Are Going To Preserve It.

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 20th Century When There Were About Fifty Million People?

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 Take The Russian Novel Or American Poetry, So I Want To Give Them The High Points, The Inescapable Poets.

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 Vague Ambition Of Becoming A Writer And I Was Trying To Write Poems And Essays And Stories, I Didn't Feel Like I Was Far Enough Along To Submit Work To Some Place And Have It Judged.

The Record Of Poetry In The 20th Century Isn't All That Great Anyway. Most Of The Poets Who Weren't Fascists Were Stalinists.