Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.

In politics yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

The message that I gave on the - on the steps today was that you need to stand for those things that are right and empower the individual. Believe in the power of one person. Don't believe that you can't do it. Everybody wants - everybody wants a shot. That we can all agree on. Beyond that it becomes politics. I'm not talking politics.

In every country today there is politics. It may be authoritarian politics but there is politics.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today even for the same performance.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place and so most poetry today is published if not directly by the person certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself working with his friends.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago when books of poems were best-sellers.