Poets From The United States

"It's like there's this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the spirit, feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit. This predator energy can take fossil fuel and other resources out of the Earth, turn it into fuel, to run a machine system. But in order for there to be a need for that system, and in order for that system to work, they have to mine our minds to get at the essence of our spirit. In the same way the external mining takes place, it pollutes—we see now, people understand how it poisons the environment, the water, the air pollution—the mining of the essence, the mining of the spirit, mining our minds ... the pollution from that is all the neurotic, distorted, insecure behavior patterns that we develop. That's the pollution. Because in order for this predatory system, this disease, to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear coherent manner. Because if we use our minds in a clear coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable."

"Sometimes when it rains, it's not that simple, when the sky has reasons to cry."

"Our duty - as citizens - to the Constitution transcends every other point of disagreement that every person and/or every group of people can have with one another, no matter how deeply felt. Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness."

"Stop any person on the street and they will tell you their own version of what it means to be an American, perhaps accurately, but mostly not. Some might say that being an American means wearing the US flag as a lapel pin. Others might say that in order to be defined as an American, one must attend the right church and be the right type of Christian. Still others will tell you that supporting the troops and, above that even, supporting the President is what makes one American. Some might even venture that being born in this country or of parents who are citizens of this country is surely enough. On this last point there is some truth, but only in terms of rights, not responsibilities. As such, it presents only half of the equation."

"Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy."

"If you consider, for example, that democracy is much like a religion then 9/11 is akin to finding the body of God."

"Perhaps [Condoleezza Rice] would have made a more timely cameo in New Orleans had a Chevron tanker caught fire. Jane Crow seems to be just as willing as old Jim was."

"I say we pardon the turkeys, but not our elected officials."

"If man was devolving into a psychotic pit of rotted plasma, [Karl] Rove would be the Alpha of such grime."

"We have no leadership, no captain at the helm as it were. We are, in effect, being led from disaster to disaster by a headless horseman run amok with stuffed pockets and an empty conscience."

"I think the Internet is to MSM what TV was to yellow journalism."

"Many have defined the neocon movement based on the highly intellectual, albeit warped, musings of Strauss and Bloom. Yet one could hardly call the current leadership intellectual or even capable of digesting this philosophy. Even neocon thinkers are jumping off the ship. Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?"

"No oath of office or obligation of duty demands that a particular political party be supported, preserved, defended, protected, and adhered to — because no political party defines what an American is."

"The incalculable Up-and-Down of Time."

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain."

"And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word."

"Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within The wide sea-marshes of Glynn."

"The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West."

"On Swinburne - He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt."

"On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile."

"On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray."

"O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead! The time needs heart — 'tis tired of head."

"Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud."

"'Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style'"

"Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me."

"My principle is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism."

"Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God."

"On Poe - I esteem Poe more highly than my countrymen are wont to do . The trouble with him (Poe) was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet."

"fear of embarrassment, fear of sticking your neck out, fear of looking foolish, fear of writing in a way that nobody else is writing (I'm not talking about trying to be extraordinary or avant-garde)... there are people who stick through for twenty years.... I'll give you an example: William Carlos Williams. In his autobiography he says (I'll have to paraphrase this, he said it with a New Jersey accent), "Well, it looks like this guy T. S. Eliot has hit it real big with The Waste Land, it looks like that is the direction for literature." His next line is: "Now I know I will have to wait twenty years to be heard." So he did, he just kept doing what he thought was right, became a powerful influence, stuck to his ideas of the American language. But lots and lots of other people said, "Well, that looks like the way to go," and trotted off, cutting their roots as they went."

"What I lacked was even the idea of a twentieth-century tradition of radical or revolutionary poetics as a stream into which a young poet could dip her glass. Among elders, William Carlos Williams wrote from the landscape of ordinary urban, contemporary America, of ordinary poor and working people, and in a diction of everyday speech, plainspoken yet astonishingly musical and flexible. But I don't recall being taken out of my skin by any Williams poem, though later I would work with his phrasing and ways of breaking a line as a means of shedding formal metrics."

"In the 1920s, he was calling for a book that was worthy of the Americas. He was thinking of a big American novel. He was not confining it to the United States. Williams was thinking of the Americas; he wanted a book that was speaking from the large ground of these two continents."

"My early identity and love poems were influenced by the imagism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams."

"When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people."

"When I was reading William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain...I thought, wow, this is it. This is the way to write about America. This is right. This is history, the mythic history. So I'm sure there was going to be a volume two. So I ran to the library and turned this one in, looking for volume two. There isn't a volume two; that's it! That was when I thought, oh. I've got to write volume two. If he didn't do it, then I've got to do it. So that's China Men. They bind the country together with steel, the bands of steel that are the railroads. That's the same kind of missing feeling; after I finished the first two books, I thought, oh! there's more language in me, this other kind of language, this very slangy, American, present-day language. And the other thing that was missing was that, well, I wanted to read some books about the time that the Beatniks went away-those are our forefathers, our immediate forefathers."

"It is difficult to get the news from poems"

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I come, my sweet,"

"When I speak"

"The storm bursts"

"In one of his poems William Carlos Williams writes that "destruction and creation are simultaneous." Picasso said a very similar thing. For Williams, that's a way of mythologizing the avant-garde, the cutting edge: you have to destroy."

"Of asphodel, that greeny flower,"

"Only give me time,"

"Endless wealth,"

"The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it."

"Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks."

"Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace."

"I cannot say"

"I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way"

"Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy."