Poets From The United States

"Rouse to some work of high and holy love, And thou an angel's happiness shall know."

"'Tis infamy to die and not be missed."

"Night-refuge, set aloft this travelled hill, 'Tis deemed by many a lodger but an inn; Others look round them better and scarce fill Their first cup ere its mystery doth begin, And they are led by some divine desire, Where, midmost of an inner room, there bends Clear flame on golden altar, to which fire A wide-eyed vestal changelessly attends. And most, so led, have joy to serve that light And with the jealous priestess vigil keep; But woe to any wearying neophyte, And woe to him who serves with eyes of sleep: To such is she more bitter than to those On whom, unlit, her doors forever close!"

"The sultry summer past, September comes, Soft twilight of the soft-declining year. All mildness, soothing loneliness and peace, The fading season ere the falling come."

"Time well employed is Satan's deadliest foe: It leaves no opening for the lurking fiend."

"Be thy best thoughts to work divine addressed; Do something — do it soon — will all thy might; An angel's wing would droop if long at rest, And God Himself inactive were no longer blessed."

"Friend of my heart! Among the Autumn trees We walk together baring thought to thought Of this vast symbol-earth wherein lie wrought Hints of immortal dreams and destinies! And you and I are part of all of these! Ourselves mysterious emblems, tones half-caught From voices far, wherein our souls have sought Deep meanings, silent, 'mid earth's melodies."

"Of true benevolence, its charms divine, With other motives to call forth its power, And its grand triumphs, multiplied beyond All former bounds, in this its golden age, Humbly I sing, awed by the holy theme; A theme exalted, though as yet unsung, In beauty rich, of inspiration full, And worthy of a nobler harp than that From which heroic strains sublimely sound."

"Out of the conquered Past Unravishable Beauty; Hearts that are dew and dust Rebuking the dream of Death; Flower of the clay down-cast Triumphant in earth’s aroma; Strings that were strained in rust A-tremble with Music’s breath!Wine that was spilt in haste Arising in fumes more precious; Garlands that fell forgot Rooting to wondrous bloom; Youth that would flow to waste Pausing in pool-green valleys— And Passion that lasted not Surviving the voiceless Tomb!"

"UPON the woven leaf, Upon the veined flower, I find my life portrayed in bief– My life from hour to hour. A frail leaf fit to die; The faithful air of heaven by, While no wind roughly blew. All day for my delight, From dark to dark my own; One butterfly delaying flight, That left me not alone. A humming-bird to float Upon a breath; a bee To blow a long complaining note, Invited were of me."

"The authentic presence of goodness is love and its manifestation in virtue; the authentic presence of truth is to be seen in the culture's conformity to reason, properly understood as an engagement with the objective reality beyond the confines of egocentric subjectivism; the authentic presence of the beautiful is a reverence for the beauty of Creation and creativity, properly perceived in the outpouring of gratitude which is the fruit of humility. A society informed and animated by such a culture is truly civilized. A civilized man is not animated by a desire to shape himself into an image of his "self," which is itself unknowable, but is willing to allow himself to be shaped into an image of the perfect Person beyond himself."

"Solzhenitsyn has re-written George Orwell's novel, using the facts of his life as his pen. He represents the victory of Winston Smith. Truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction; it has a happier ending."

"Whether it's conscious or subconscious, intentional or unintentional, a work of art always embodies and incarnates in some sense the deepest-held beliefs of an author. Therefore, an author's theology and philosophy, in the context of the times in which the author lives, are clearly going to inform the work."

"Today, after the Soviet Union's demise, and after the statues of Stalin have been ignominiously toppled, it is easy to forget the sheer enormity of Solzhenitsyn's achievement. Quite simply, what he did was considered to be impossible. It was beyond belief that one man could defy the communist state and survive. It was even more unbelievable that he should not only survive, but that he should play a significant role in the state's downfall and that he should outlive the state itself. Solzhenitsyn's life and example flew in the face of the "reality" of the "realists"."

"was, or should be, a key to the treasures of mystical experience, a means of expressing through sub-creation man's unity with the primary Creation of which he is part. It could also, in its highest form, be an expression of the homesickness of the soul in spiritual exile, a longing for that eternal realm for which the soul begins to ache."

"We near the realization of that supreme social concept, our whole view of life and, consequently, of art, will be correspondingly modified. We shall come to insist more and more upon experts in all things. Respect for standards, love of order, will return. The petty personalism, that has long dominated us, will die away. Our poets will achieve the objective view of the world of men and things—and it is out of that view that all great art, as all great life, must grow."

"Meeting and getting to know John Gneisenau Neihardt was one of those thrills of a lifetime."

"The relationship between the counterculture and Indian country was complicated from the beginning. Desiring a deeper connection with the Earth and a more meaningful form of spirituality, hippies made pilgrimages to reservations searching for the mystical Indian wisdom they had read about in books like John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks and Carlos Castaneda's wildly successful but fraudulent series about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus."

"Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who uses poetry to write of the wonders of the natural world. She writes about being brown in white America, about being a daughter, a wife, a mother, of being a woman making sense of her own skin."

"…It was very purposeful that I included animals that I’ve never touched, never looked into their eyes. We should be able to care for creatures outside of [our immediate vicinity]. We should be able to care about plants and animals and people that we’ve never seen before."

"I love the poet Kwame Dawes, and I always come back to this quote of his: “We are political by our noise and by our silence.” What we choose to be excited about is political. For the longest time, I’d kind of cringe, thinking I’m not bold enough to be political. His words really helped me own the power of my own enthusiasm. Think of how many things weren’t championed by the publishing world in the ’80s and ’90s. Think of how many things weren’t even encouraged. It’s not that there weren’t Asian Americans writing literature or writing about nature. The publishing houses chose not to publish them. That’s a political statement, too….So for anybody who says, Oh, I don’t want to get too political here—we’re all political. You’re political by what you champion and what you stay quiet about."

"One thing I discovered, when I was doing reading for this [collection], is that one of the roots of the word wonder means to smile. Wonder is wanting to know more about others, with a smile. It’s that joy. And I don’t know if this sounds Pollyannaish, but you don’t have to teach a kid to wonder…"

"… I still think of that 8-year-old girl who loved sitting on the floor of her library, reading about animals and plants. How excited I was to read new nature books. Every time, turn to the back cover, and it was always a White guy. I never saw someone like me. I might have started thinking, maybe outdoors is not for me [if it wasn’t for] my parents, who showed me what it means to have a garden and how much fun it was to memorize the constellations. So it was weird, because I was internalizing what I saw as a lover of pop culture, but what my parents modeled was different…"

"I’ve never really defined myself by a single identity—and in these times where identity means so much, I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of an outsider to every identity. Perhaps that makes me uniquely suited to writing about teens, who often feel on the outside"

"Kids are kids. No matter what year it is, no matter what language they speak or culture they’re in. There is something deeply universal about being a teenager, and I try to capture that universality in the things that I write."

"It seems that a greater awareness is arising among Catholics, clerical and lay, of the need for the eternal spirit of chivalry. One cannot know if the Knightly organisations of today, ancient or modern, will weather the storm. But certainly their proliferation is a good sign that the yearning for the virtue of honour, loyalty, prowess, courtesy, and all the rest — married to a strong and practical Catholicity — is once again stalking the ruins of Christendom, here and abroad. We shall all need it if the evils of our time are to be resisted."

"Our attempts at rebuilding Christendom must be intimately linked with performing the Spiritual and Corporal works of Mercy. It may be that what we do in the temporal sphere might indeed lay the foundations for some future outward revival of Christendom – though what form that shall take is doubtless as impossible for us to imagine as the work of Justinian and Charlemagne was for Ss. Ambrose and Augustine, for all that that duo’s efforts were essential to both Imperial revivals. But whether or not that happens, may our spiritual endeavours alongside the other result in our becoming permanent subjects of that celestial realm of which any earthly expression of Christendom, however grand, is only a poor shadow and reflexion."

"O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror."

"Like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer."

"I feel my capacity to experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human mind—something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements."

"Normally death don't really bother me, I'm from southside Stockton. I’m all too familiar with how some family reunions only ever take place on graveyard grass, and a hole can be a safe haven for a soul in this mortal game of hide and go seek. But, there is something so different about Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and the countless others."

"As with any classic novel, each subsequent reading teaches me a bit more about myself, about the greater world, and about the nature of life and mystery; because at each reading, I approach the texts as a different person."

"Tolkien takes the stance that I believe all of us should take; that is, of decent, though fallible, people struggling against evil. He does not wallow in horrible scenes and images, though horrible events are certainly depicted in his writings. Rather, he dwells on hope, on perseverance, on faith, on honour, and on love. As a result of Tolkien’s own stance, I have rarely painted or sketched a scene from Middle-earth that was deliberately ugly, or dark, or that I intended should in any way glorify or honour the power or the triumph of evil. I wish to follow Tolkien in highlighting light, and life, and the deeply-felt longing we all have for the good, the true, and the beautiful."

"There is no greater pleasure for me than to have someone see a painting or a sketch of mine and say to me “yes, that’s exactly how I always pictured it!."

"…for me the great human virtue is promiscuity, the fact that we love mixture, that we are excited by collisions between cultures, languages, traditions. This is why I’m so disgusted by the rejection of this virtue by nationalists of various stripes—and also why I’m resistant to “stay in your lane” condemnations of “cultural appropriation.” Of course, encounters with the other are fraught with peril and—like any ethically meaningful human endeavor—inherently “problematic.” Of course, we need to be mindful and reverent as we attempt to reach across borders of various kinds. But any attempt to build walls—between bodies, between cultural traditions, between languages and aesthetics—is abhorrent to me."

"I really do think of prose as writing sentences. I never think to myself “I’m writing a novel”. Not until I’m very deep into a project do I even think “I’m writing a book”. The kind of sentence I’m attracted to is a kind of navigating device where the sentence itself is moving me through the world and is the tool by which I am able to feel out a territory or a set of concerns."

"…There’s a way in which I hope the nine chapters are like spheres of intensity that are placed in a relationship that is not the consequence of plot or the linearity of chronology, but is instead a kind of constellation, that there are charged relationships between them that is like a key change, or a mood, or an echo, or a motif. That may sound pretentious, but I think there’s a place for pretentiousness in art."

"The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I’m staring into an abyss—that’s when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression—in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it’s crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality."

"The sky is colored like a peacock's breast; There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold Down where the woods their somber branches hold In silhouette against the fading west. Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest, Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold. A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold, Like one sharp note from elfin viol wrest. This is the haunted hour,—such woods surround Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale; In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found ⁠The faery woman in the river-vale; And underneath this star long, long ago The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!"

"A metaphor is a sign of desperation when we need another world to describe what we are feeling. Metaphors are about desperation and safety. We call out to metaphor because a metaphor makes us feel safe."

"It is the hardest thing to take chaos and make order of it. Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a very fast pace."

"take Jericho Brown, telling too much necessary truth in all his work, but especially "Bullet Points," on the violence black men and women experience at the hands of cops. "I promise that if you hear/Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me." I heard Jericho read this live and found myself on the edge of my seat, my fingers curled into tight, sweaty fists as I tried to absorb the pain wrapped in the intense beauty of his words."

"What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger…"

"A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on…"

"The reason why I fell in love with being a playwright and why I fell in love with theatre is because I grew up in it. My first poem was published at six and called “I Am Stronger than Hate.” I proclaimed then that, “I am stronger than hate, I will open the gate, the gate to a kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter what your race, or the color of your face. I am stronger than hate,” and of why I am a poet and playwright. This work is about community."

"I was like, “Man, young people in Chicago need to hear these young people in Ferguson articulate that, because that’s so powerful for young people to come to that political awakening on their own—outside of academia, outside of institutions that they’ve been denied access to.” And so we were really inspired to build with them. And we came back the next week and asked them if we could launch a pop-up gallery on their campsite. So we printed the photos that we had taken the week before, we brought down easels, and we created a pop-up gallery on the camp site—that was sort of the first gesture, the first portal of this loose collective of artists that would later become #LetUsBreathe, using art as an access point for political education and engagement, turning the Ferguson protest’s occupation into an art gallery…"

"My inspiration for this play derives from a combination of my personal and the collective grief around the mass shooting in the United States. These incidents made me pay attention to the National conversation around the topic of gun violence. On social media I constantly read “lone white shooter” and I started to think about the cycle of how news is dispersed, interpreted, re-dispersed and reinterpreted. This cycle is destructive. From this news, what assumptions do we make about the shooter? About the victims? And about the moments between gunshots?..."

"Chicago for me means life. I have lived in Chicago all my life. It keeps calling me back even though I have tried to escape. Chicago is a city filled with some of the most corruption and also some of the most courageous and successful organizing resistance overall. Chicago will always affect how I represent myself when I travel. It is home…"

"I get to whisper to them, "I love you, I see you, I know. I know you're scared, and it's OK to be scared, and if you can't be scared out there you can be scared in here. Within the pages of this book, you can be who you wholly are." And perhaps that might be empowering enough to at least add a bit of significance to their lives."

"I don't expect it to be easy, but I'm certain it will be fruitful. My mission is to take a different approach: Instead of explicitly encouraging young people to read, my goal is to get them to see the value in their own narratives — that they, too, have a story, and that there's power not just in telling it, but in the opportunity to do so."