When I Was In College, I Lost

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.

[osip] Mandelstam Was Killed By Stalinist Forces.

The Thing I Learned Is That The Work Is Getting Done By People Who Dig In And Work On A Particular Project: The People Who Spend 20 Years Sustaining A Theater For Black Teenagers In Chicago; The People Who Reintroduce Sticklebacks Into Strawberry Creek In Berkeley And Then Wait Patiently For The First Egrets To Show Up.

I Thought It Was Irrelevant To Talk About What A Wonderful Thing Poetry Was If You Didn't Teach People To Read.

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.