The Earth Forgives The Previous Year Every

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

Everybody Has A Different Idea Of When Those Good Old Days Were, But Everyone Is Convinced That There Was A Time When Literature Really Mattered And That It Doesn't Now. They Also Tend To Believe That It Really Matters Someplace Else - In Very Improbable Places Often. Russia Is Someone's Idea Of A Place Where Literature Really Counts.

If You're Going To Get Up To Walt Whitman And Robert Frost And Langston Hughes And Sylvia Plath You've Got To Figure Out How You Put People In Possession Of Their Heritage. To Do That You Have To Talk About How They're Being Taught, And The Imagination Of Community The People Who Are Running Our Government Have.

When I Began Writing Poems, It Was In The Late 60s And Early 70s When The Literary And Cultural Atmosphere Was Very Much Affected By What Was Going On In The World, Which Was, In Succession, The Civil Rights Movement, The Antiwar Movement, And The Women's Movement In The 60s, 70s, And Into The Early 80s. And All Of Those Things Affected Me And Affected My Thinking, Particularly The Vietnam War.

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 Percent Of Americans Have Some College Education. That's An Astronomical Change.