Essayists From The United States

"When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise."

"Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity."

"It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you."

"I admire Gary Snyder and his ecological commitment very much."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"the actual writing was probably a year and a half, but the getting ready to be able to write it was three or four years, roughly. I was kind of getting my head in place. (“How did you do that?”) I don't know. It's underground material. It's what Gary Snyder calls "composting." You know, stuff has to go down inside of you, get into the dark and turn into something else, before you can use it in art. If you use raw experience, straight experience, you're doing journalism which is another discipline."

"People like Rothenberg and, of course, Gary Snyder perfected the "white shamanism" movement. The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know."

"Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same—hardihood. Give them raw truth."

"The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both."

"Historically, Buddhist philosophers have failed to analyze out the degree to which ignorance and suffering are caused or encouraged by social factors. ... Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion."

"The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear."

"The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer."

"The Sioux idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and men are temporary energy swirls, turbulence patterns ... that’s an early intuitive recognition of energy as a quality of matter. But that’s an old insight, you know, extremely old—probably a Paleolithic shaman’s insight. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I would say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception."

"Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion."

"Toni Morrison and I and Leslie Marmon Silko traveled through China together five years ago, with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Francine du Plessix Gray...Ginsberg and Snyder are Buddhists. Gary Snyder had that book, Cold Mountain Poems, and we went to the Cold Mountain Monastery where he presented the poems to the monks that were there. And there was a painting on the wall that was the same painting that was in his book, which he identified with. And it felt really good because though the Chinese have wiped out the temples, his temple was still there."

"The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear. ... The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet. ... They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them."

"Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west."

"How could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and livable temperature range between freezing and boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place"... gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind."

"If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment."

"I am struck by how much we talk about rebirthing but never about rebearing. The word itself is unfamiliar to most people. Yet both women and men are capable of rebearing, women literally and men metaphorically. A door opens just by changing the name. We don't have to be reborn; we can rebear. This is part of the writer's job, either to rebear the metaphors or refuse to use them. Gary Snyder's lifelong metaphor is watershed. How fruitful that is!"

"I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again."

"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."

"I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years."

"She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality. She wrote from her experience in a woman's body and a dark skin, though never solely "as" or "for." Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks's and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic...She knew many poetries, ancient and modern; her sonnets, for example, are both silken and surprising. But in her preface to the collection Passion, she matched herself consciously most incisive essays from the last two decades with the tradition of "New World poetry," non-European, deriving in North America from Whitman, and including "Pablo Neruda, Agostinho Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker and Edward Brathwaite.""

"I also want to read, and make, poems that remind me "why it must come," why what June Jordan calls the logic of "the infinite connectedness of human life" demands equality in community. This poetry is worth our most sacred and profane passion, because it embodies our desire, what we might create, in the difficult world around the poem."

"June's work opened new ways for me as a reader to think about nature poetry. In fact, as a longtime reader of her work, I had never thought of her as an environmental poet, perhaps because I had categorized her as a social justice poet and a black feminist writer, and in my mind, as a result of years of literary and cultural indoctrination, these identities were separate from what was most commonly defined as "nature poet." And yet, as I read her collected work again in search of nature poetry, I found it everywhere. June saw everything as connected, and she loved nature and spoke out on its behalf."

"June Jordan’s poetry embraces a half-century in which she dwelt as poet, intellectual, and activist: also as teacher, observer, and recorder. In a sense unusual among twentieth-century poets of the United States, she believed in and lived the urgency of the word — along with action — to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in — and beyond — her country."

"In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death’s mouth … she has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept. … I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art."

"A few years ago, there was the first collection ever published of political essays written by a Black woman-June Jordan. Think about that. It's amazing there are so few."

"June Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet."

"In the words of June Jordan, “We always have choices. And capitulation is only one of them.”"

"Let us imagine the prospect-for the first time in the nation's history-of a population united for fundamental change. Would the elite turn as so often before, to its ultimate weapon-foreign intervention-to unite the people with the Establishment, in war? It tried to do that in 1991, with the war against Iraq. But, as June Jordan said, it was "a hit the same way that crack is, and it doesn't last long.""

"What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?"

"Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed."

"This man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered."

"Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him."

"I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative."

"Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it."

"Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday?"

"Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give."

"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."

"Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man, Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make an change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch."

"right now I’m re-reading and re-reading Robert Hayden’s poems, which are absolutely beautiful and brilliant."

"The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind."

"Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid."

"When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth."

"Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire."