In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is 'Where do you teach?' The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.

As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful ind…

The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they repo…

Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible a…

When I was a kid in school, the career advisor came to see us and said, 'Look, I advise you to get a career, what can I say?' And he took me aside and he said,…

Don't send a poet to London.

My family was musical on both sides. My father's family had a famous flautist and a classical pianist. My mother won a contest to be Shirley Temple's double --…