[osip] Mandelstam Was Killed By Stalinist Forces.

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.

What We Usually Find Is That When People Think They Have A New Idea Or Approach Something For The First Time, It Is Actually A Recurrence Of A Line Of Thinking Explored In The Past.

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

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.

Like Everyone Else, I Was At Least Peripherally Involved In The Antiwar Movement. You Woke Up Every Morning Feeling Tormented About What Was Going On In Vietnam. It Seemed To A Lot Of Us Like A Catastrophe From The Very Beginning, Inflicting Immense And Needless Suffering On Not Only The American Soldiers But On A Lot Of Innocent Peasants Who Were Caught In A Cold War Proxy Battle - Two Million Vietnamese Died During Those Years, And You Woke Up Every Morning Knowing That That Was Going On.