If You Read Three Books A Day

One Way To Escape The Universe In Which Everything Is A Kind Of Media Cartoon Is To Write About The Part Of Your Life That Doesn't Feel Like A Cartoon, And How The Cartoon Comes Into It.

Where Politics Is Concerned, I Think Poets Have To Be Pragmatists, Philosophical Pragmatists.

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.

In The Beginning Of The 19th Century, Maybe Forty Percent Of Women And Fifty Percent Of Men Could Produce A Signature, Which Meant That They'd Had At Least Three Years Of Education Because It Was In Third Grade That People Started Penmanship In The 19th Century. And Of Course Black People Could Get Killed If They Got Caught Teaching Themselves To Read In Some Parts Of The Country.

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.