Editors From The United States

"She opened her mouth and a siren came out."

"As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world."

"I think of poets over the ages sending their voices out into the sky, leaving quiet, indelible trails."

"what lovely, larger life becomes ours when we listen to one another"

"I can't stop believing human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt "news" may be exchanged."

"Liyana Abboud had just tasted her first kiss when her parents announced they were leaving the country. (first line)"

"This is what I want a book of poems and paintings to be-a surprising spring waking us from our daily sleep. A feast of little dishes. An unexpected walk along the rim of a majestic city. Ahlan Wa Sahlan-You are all welcome!"

""Poetry is like language soup, the taste of different flavors. Sometimes you just like the way a word sounds, pressed up against another word." She said poetry was contagious. In a good way. (p184)"

"Think of all the towns and cities we've never seen or imagined."

""How should we use poetry?" people sometimes ask me. Read it! Share it with one another! Find poems that make you resonate. Different poems will do this for every person. We "use poetry" to restore us to feeling, revitalize our own speech, awaken empathy."

"Outside, the sky felt deep and dark as if a large soft blanket had been thrown over the hills and valleys. (p54)"

"Give up the annoying question, "How long does this have to be?" Just wonder-how long does it need to be? Then try to find out."

"There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain. And I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that other person might be experiencing. And it sounds so basic, but these days, when you listen to the loud voices, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence?"

"There may be nothing more "basic" in education than gaining a sense of one's own voice. By acknowledging and shaping shared experience, we grow bigger. Poems help us see the world around us as rich material. And nothing is better than reading the work of our peers, as well as the work of older poets, to get us going in our particular terrain. A poem we love makes us want to write our own-hand to hand, map to map, contagious, delicious voices spinning us forward inside our cluttered, clattering lives."

"Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible."

"Maybe peace was the size of a teacup. (p226)"

"In the midst of public jabber, high-velocity advertising, and shameless television, where is one true word? Where are three? Who will pause long enough to describe something truly, and clearly? Where is the burn of speech, the sweet rub of language, the spark that links us? Poetry, poetry! Rearranging right at the heart level, where standardized tests often don't go. I think our frenzied days are hungry for the kind of quietude poetry offers. It doesn't take long to weave it into our lives."

"When you liked somebody, you wanted to trade the best things you knew about. You liked them not only for themselves, but for the parts of you that they brought out. (p255)"

"There was a door in the heart that had no lock on it."

"That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing."

"It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness."

""You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them." (p258)"

"Suheila commented that people argued most where there was least to talk about. If conversation was rich and subjects many, talk kept rolling fluidly, passing over rough spots like water over rocks. But once everything had been said, you started paddling backwards, flinging water and scraping your knees."

"Sometimes it works to fight logic with logic and craziness with craziness. This truth, however, cannot be depended on."

"Here at home, the night belonged to the moon. Electricity was rationed, three hours each evening."

"I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!"

"I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name."

"I hope you feel as I do that it wouldn't be that hard for the United States to have two friends. You know, to have only one good friend seems like the dark side of junior high school. Every time President Obama or any president says, "Israel, you are our enduring friend forever," I think, Okay that's fine, but couldn't you have two friends? What about, "Palestine, you are our friend too." Why not?"

"I have always thought about how stupid and boring violence seems in this world where we could just listen to more stories instead, right? We could ask people who trouble us, Could you tell me your story? Usually I have found when you ask someone to do that, you end up feeling closer to them, even if their story in no way mirrors yours. Find a better thing to do."

"I keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn't have selected ourselves. The worlds we are born into, the people we are related to, the landscapes we learn to love wherever we are."

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

"Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it all out..."

"However little she may realize it, every girl who rides her steel horse is a vivid illustration of one of the greatest waves of progress of this century, the advancement of women in freedom and opportunity."

"I have always made it a rule of my life to try and understand a subject before attempting to criticize or to influence others either for or against it."

"History and experience are the two master teachers of nations and civilization."

"It seems to me that there is nothing in literature more valuable for young people to read than the lives of those who, in travelling the journey of life, have left their impress for good or bad on society. Every life carries its lessons - it matters not whether they are warnings or inspirations, they are alike valuable to the young who have the journey before them."

"Included in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History by Gerda Lerner (1972)"

"I am a Negro woman. My people came before the Mayflower."

"For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second highest office in the land. It is a great honor to be chosen as a pioneer, and a great responsibility."

"William Shakespeare has one of his characters propose, Let’s kill all the lawyers. He forgot to include the bureaucrats."

"I’ve learned pogroms do not require much in the way of organization. Merely ample hate."

"Thanks to my work, I know the type all too well. A malcontent, a refusenik. A grievance monger, quick as a scampering lemur to take offense. Such people make little sense to me."

"And so he nattered on, like an old woman fretting over the fraying of her prayer rug, not realizing the ceaseless nervous fidgeting of her fingers was the cause of its fraying."

"Bureaucracies are dullards’ tools of revenge on men of action. Sputtering machines filled with blinkered human cogs, they respond glacially to signals issued by their political masters, rather like ponderous dinosaurs whose tiny brains required an auxiliary neural center within the hip region to re-transmit commands all the way to their tail."

"Would it be riding the wave, or stepping over a puddle?"

"People will believe what they want most to believe, what they yearn to be true. Nothing is more readily accepted than the seeming confirmation of an already established prejudice."

"Psychologists claim the mind is incapable of imagining itself not existing, of mentally inhabiting its own extinction. Yet I can sense obliteration’s lackeys nibbling away at my edges, hungry mice eating the brown crusts of the bread of my being."

"“The wall will always be there to protect us,” they said. I later came to understand that it is merely a tangible, universally visible symbol of the far more important invisible walls separating the seventy-thousand subcommunities—or is it eighty-thousand now? One day, I firmly believe, there will be as many subcommunities as there are residents in the City."

"I'm hard-pressed to think of a thing that happened in politics that is purely just comedy, because people's lives are at stake. I think the worst kind of political cartoon is just, like, "Look at this thing that happened." Like, "Here's a drawing of a news event with nothing to say about it." No point of view, nothing to say. That's not funny to me. What is funny to me is a point of view. It's something to say that is interesting or surprising about the subjects. Like, what is bad about Trump? 'Cause there's a million things, right? I think what's bad about Trump is the system that produced him. I try to think much more about the root causes of things and less about the aesthetic differences that I have with a politician. The jokes that are just like, "Oh, Trump's hands are small" are less funny to me. It's a little easy to poke fun at a person; it's harder and more interesting to poke fun at a structure. Because when you see Trump do something, it's not just him; it's hundreds of thousands of people enabling his policy-it's a whole support system there. For me, it was really clarifying when Trump was elected. A lot of the reaction, especially the more center-left, was like, "Oh no, Trump has dropped out of space, like from a meteorite. He's this rogue figure!" That's distorting everything he is. You can draw an extremely straight line from where the Republican Party was at with Reagan to Trump. I think it's more interesting to talk about that stuff."

"My style is very self-taught. I sort of taught myself drawing from watching The Simpsons and reading The Far Side. I think you can see those two things come out in my comics. I really like drawing gross stuff. I really like drawing gooey shit. I like to draw Ted Cruz, because he's really melty. I love to draw someone melting, or with extra eyeballs. I love a skull. Fire is really fun. So there's all these things that I just like to draw, and they'll end up in my comics."