Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or

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.

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.

If You Ask Me If I Have This Or That Principle, Tell Me What Its Consequences Are, And Then I'll Tell You Whether I Have That Principle Or Not.

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.

Our History Doesn't Look At Our Own Violence, The Violence In Our Own Past, And We Go Out And Repeat It Someplace Else.