Writing Is An Incessant Process Of Discovery.

Haiku Is An Art That Seems Dedicated To Making People Pay Attention To The Preciousness And Particularity Of Every Moment Of Existence. I Think That Poetry Can Do That.

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.

It's The Same With This Idea Of A Literate Public, And Also Of A Democracy In Which People Have Access To And Really Read The Best Books. It Turns Out That Even When You Create This Kind Of Environment, Maybe Only 10 Percent Of The People Want To Read Those Books.

My Suspicion Is That Once You Have Literacy In Place, The Readership Has Not Changed Very Much.

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.