I Think That What Art Can Do

When I Came Into The Job, Funding For The Humanities At The Federal Level Was Being Drastically Cut. This Was The High Tide Of The New Republican Congress.

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

It Turns Out - This Is A Metaphor Out Of [charles] Dickens - That The Raw Sewage Emptied Into The Anacostia Comes From The Federal Triangle. I Have A Sewer Map, And On It You Can See The Pipe From Which Congressional Wastes Empty Into The River That Then Flows Through The Black Neighborhoods Of Washington, D.c. It Is Very Expensive To Do Anything About The River, But Somebody's Working On It.

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.

There's Very Little Solid Research On Readership, Yet People Make Pronouncements About It All The Time.