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

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" When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large. "

" 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. "

" There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. "

" As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. "

" Writing is an incessant process of discovery. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

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

" The Earth forgives the previous year every year. "

" The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that. "

" 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. "

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

" You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools. "

" I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read. "

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

" 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. "

" When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills. "