Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.

Golf is a worrier’s game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

The first book that really knocked me out was the ‘Brothers Karamazov.’ I read it when I was a senior in high school.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.

When I was in high school in the ’50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.