Nostalgia Locates Desire In The Past Where

It Is Good Sometimes For Poetry To Disenchant Us.

Milton Was The First Person Who Really Experimented With Putting Politics Into Sonnets.

I Suppose There's Something To Be Said For The Sheer Reinforcement Of Our Beliefs, But Really I Think Poetry Is More Useful As Disenchantment Than Enchantment.

I Think That Poets Can Say, "what We Want Is For Everybody On Earth To Wake Up Free From Fear And With Access To Medicine And Clean Water And Education." But I Don't Think Poets Have Any Special Insight On How To Get There. And The 20th Century Is A Pretty Good Record Of That Because So Many Of The Great Poets Were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, Etc. They Wrote Their Odes To Lenin And Stalin. They Glorified Some Of The Most Violent And Grotesque Dictatorships Of The 20th Century. And A Lot Of The Ones Who Were Not Stalinists Were Fascists Or Fascist Sympathizers.

I Think That Were I In The Middle Of An Obsession To Write About, Say, Sudden Oak Death In California Or My Grandchildren Or Time And Memory And How They Look When You Get To Be In Your Sixties, And I Thought, "well, Yes But People Are Dying Every Day In Baghdad," I Wouldn't Feel Guilty About Not Writing About Baghdad If I Didn't Have Any Good Ideas About How To Write About It.