Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or

Our History Doesn't Look At Our Own Violence, The Violence In Our Own Past, And We Go Out And Repeat It Someplace Else.

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 The One Showing Up In The Market. Nobody Was Tending To The Way We're Imaginatively Connected To Each Other.

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

I Think That The Job Of Poetry, Its Political Job, Is To Refresh The Idea Of Justice, Which Is Going Dead In Us All The Time.

There Are Instances: [henry David] Thoreau Read [john] Wordsworth, [john] Muir Read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt Read Muir, And You Got National Parks. It Took A Century For This To Happen, For Artistic Values To Percolate Down To Where Honoring The Relation Of People's Imagination To The Land, Or Beauty, Or To Wild Things, Was Issued In Legislation.