I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

 ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

Appointment viewing is dead, and I think it is going away.

I think Walking Dead is one of the friendliest new reader type books in that every time a new trade is shipped out, a new issue is shipped out at the same time.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.