Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full

Prose Gets Divided Up Into Fiction And Nonfiction And Short Fiction And Long Fiction And Autobiographical Nonfiction And So On. Poetry Can Do Any Of Those Things Except With The Added Definition Of Intensified Formal Pressure.

A Movement Got Started For Common Schools, And By The End Of The 19th Century, 91 Percent Of Americans Could Read And Write.

I Don't Know That I Had A Sense That There Was Such A Thing As "the Poetry World" In The 1960s And Early 70s. Maybe Poets Did, But For Me As An Onlooker And Reader Of Poetry, Poetry Felt Like It Was Part Of A Larger Literary World. I Mean, Even The Phrase "the Poetry World" Reflects A Sort Of Balkanization Of American Literary And Artistic Life That Has To Some Extent Happened Since Then.

There's A Good Deal In Pound's And Eliot's Poetry That Stood Up Even Though Their Politics Were Deplorable. Or Pound's Very Deplorable, Eliot's Kind Of Deplorable.

Imagination Runs Through The Places Where We Live Like Water. We Need Both Things-a Living Knowledge Of The Land And A Live Imagination Of It And Our Place In It- If We Are Going To Preserve It.