Jazz may well be considered America's most treasured and most influential export, ... From its earliest days until now it has continued to grow creatively -- yet the people who have given us this art form deserve far greater recognition.

Jazz is one of the great, truly native American art forms. Along with the movies, it's probably the art that the rest of the world associates most deeply with America.

It's important that America recognizes its own great artists while they're still alive.

Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless. It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the twentieth century was thrown out the window by technologies in the twenty-first century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch---we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back? In an odd sort of way, much of contemporary pop music resembles opera, with all the subtle shadings of bent notes and microtonal alterations abandoned in the quest for mathematically pure tones.