I Teach A Lecture Course On American

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.

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.

One May Prefer Spring And Summer To Autumn And Winter, But Preference Is Hardly To The Point. The Earth Turns, And We Live In The Grain Of Nature, Turning With It.

[osip] Mandelstam, Who Wasn't A Political Thinker, Loved The Idea Of The City-state. One Of The Emblems In His Poetry Of The Politics He Imagined, Over And Against The Universalizing Politics Of [carl] Marx, Was The Medieval City Of Novgorod, Which Had In Its Center A Public Well Where The Water Was Free To Everyone. That Became For Him A Figure Of Justice.

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 Days When People Read Serious Novels.