What We Usually Find Is That When

Another Problem About Writing About Politics In The "age Of Globalization" Is That So Much Of The Violence In The Form Of War And Also In The Forms Of Institutional Violence - Sweatshops, Child Labor, Victimization Of People Economically - Happens Elsewhere And Out Of Sight. And When We Do Know About It And Need To Witness It, It's Always Mediated By Images Of One Kind Or Another, So You're Kind Of Stuck Trying To Write About What It's Like Trying To Be You Living Your Life Thinking About And Experiencing This Stuff In That Way.

Someone In Ireland Asked Me How Many Republican Poets There Were In The U.s., And I Thought Maybe Two. Maybe There Are 10,000 Poets, And Maybe There Are Two Republicans Among Them.

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.

Literature, The Study Of Literature In English In The 19th Century, Did Not Belong To Literary Studies, Which Had To Do With Greek, Latin, And Hebrew, But Instead With Elocution And Public Speaking. So When People Read Literature, It Was To Memorize And To Recite It.

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.