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If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.

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.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.