Poets From The United States

"I like to mess around with my stories. I'd rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than have to write the story in the first place. That initial writing just seems to me the hard place I have to get to in order to go on and have fun with the story. Rewriting for me is not a chore—it's something I like to do. [...] I do know that revising the work once it's done is something that comes naturally to me and is something I take pleasure in doing. Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out. It's a process more than a fixed position."

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."

"A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore."

"“All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.”"

"“My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.”"

"How compelling is the voice in the story at hand? That's another test of mine. Like most readers, I turn away from a whine or from the overly self-involved. I don't waste time on smart alecks either. There has to be something at stake, something important working itself out from sentence to sentence."

"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey."

"Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life."

"There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me."

"“Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.""

"Then let my skeleton soulWrithe upward from its loam,Drink red morning again,And look gently home."

"The probing knife of madnessCan start a dullard brain;Cold cheeks feel kissesAnd warm with tears again"

"Then no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness To reap at daylight's fallow edge, with bullet or knife,That flicker of hoof or pelt, that flash of wings returning -The dogs trace it - harvest of life that gives me life."

"This is an autumn when they come no more.Beech leaves yellow and fall, the beech-mast rotsUneaten. Infertile now the beechHollows its heart, begetting naught.There is frost on the grandson's eyes,And only rumor upon the skies..."

"For he has seen a road by healing watersHushed into wintry slate against the sand,And spoken there with the wind's elfin daughters,And mingled in their dusty saraband.He has known winds that blow from blossomy closes,Rich with the fruity smell of summertide,And kissed warm faery lips... Now he reposes,While we are not quite certain he has died."

"The sky drips its spectral And Gods, like men, to soot revert.Gone is the mild, the serene air.The golden years are come too late.Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,But what blind motion, what dim lastRegret of men who slew their pastRaised up this bribe against their fate."

"Father remembered the wild pigeons crowdingBeech groves, mast-rich. The flutter in boughs, the cloudDarkening all, a hurricane circling and surging.Eye lost count, ear could not measure sound.Mind hurled measureless with them, feathered the sky."

"Farewell,Army of Tennessee! Rough glory, rooted here,Feeds the lone vow, the lingering touchOf a late comrade sworn to remember you!Lights glow from river and town. The darkness stabs.And winter sweeps the undefended earth."

"The seed of Appomattox blooms; its fruitRots where eyes are dazed with a hungry searching,And ears are deaf with steps that murmur and followNo command."

"The whispering in the marrow spreads to the brain;The remembering heart carries it round againTill it beats in the throat, the lips, the weeping eyeAnd is born at last in a blazing wordless outcry."

"I want the word that burns into my heartLike God's coal alive on the Prophet's tongue.I would listen now while memory is ablazeTo seal your testament within my soul."

"Why did my father write? I know he sawHistory clutched as a wraith out of blowing mistWhere tongues are loud, and a glut of little soulsLaps at the too much blood and the burning house."

"We mourned with you then in brotherhood,And I'll weep with you now for those whose namesBurn on your monuments like altar flames."

"We, too, have names that blaze on mouldering stoneAnd I have seen men's tears fall where they sleptAnd heard a shouting while I wept,A century off yet louder in my earThan all that's so much magnified and near."

"Something stirs that once had life. It dropsInto the stream, a last act of faith.Seedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,These have outstayed their autumn, teasing deathOnly so far, not yet beyond all patience.Now they let go."

"Often you shall think your road impassable, sombre and companionless. Have will and plod along; and round each curve you shall find a new companion."

"Your breath upon the wind shall surely lodge within some breast. Ask not whose breast it is. See only that the breath itself be pure."

"Love is the Law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of Man."

"So think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire upon the sky for all and everything to see. For so, in truth, it is."

"Whoever cannot find a temple in his heart, the same can never find his heart in any temple."

"How much more infinite a sea is Man? Be not so childish as to measure him from head to foot and think that you have found his borders."

"The more elaborate his labyrinths, the further from the Sun his face."

"Logic is immaturity weaving its nets of gossamer wherewith it aims to catch the behemoth of knowledge. When Logic comes of age it strangles itself in its nets and then becomes transmuted into Faith, which is the deeper knowledge. Logic is a crutch for the cripple; but a burden for the swift of foot; and a greater burden still for the winged."

"Ask not of things to shed their veils. Unveil yourselves, and things will be unveiled."

"Love is the only freedom from attachment. When you love everything, you are attached to nothing."

"To feed on Death is to become food for Death. To live by others' pain is to become a prey for pain. So has decreed the Omniwill. Know that and choose your course, Micayon."

"For the yearners know that the life of flesh is but the bridge to the fleshless Life. And the yearners know that the coarse and inadequate senses are but the peepholes into the world of the infinitely fine and adequate sense. And the yearners know that every flesh they tear they must inevitably repair, sooner or later, with their own flesh; and every bone they crush they must rebuild with their own bone; and every drop of blood they spill they must replenish with their own blood. For, that is the law of flesh."

"While the non-yearner grasps for more and yet more things to put away in his pocket or belly, the yearner walks his way without a pocket, and with a belly clean of any creature's blood and convulsions."

"Of two men sharing with a calf the milk of that calf's mother one eyes the calf with the thought that his tender flesh would provide good meat for him and his friends to feast upon at his approaching birthday. The other thinks of the calf as his brother of the teat and is filled with affection for the young beast and his mother. I say to you, the latter is truly nourished by that calf's meat; while the first is poisoned thereby. Aye, many things are put in the belly that should be put in the heart."

"If that be your guiding spirit in eating of the heart of the Earth, then little does it matter what you eat. But if that be, indeed, your guiding spirit, then should you have the wisdom and the love not to bereave the Earth of any of her children, especially those which have come to feel the pleasure of living and the pain of dying – those that have arrived at the segment of Duality. For they, too, have their road to wend, slowly and laboriously, towards Unity. And their road is longer than yours. Delay them in their march, and they shall delay you in your march."

"For other peoples will, I do not doubt, still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features, or draw out of the marble living lines, plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven with wands and tell the rising constellations; but yours will be the rulership of nations, remember Roman, these will be your arts: to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud."

"I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive; he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores."

"Euryalus, is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man's relentless longing becomes a god to him?"

"We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Women, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would."

"I used to have boundaries up all the time, which is limiting. I never want to feel limited. If anything is life changing, being the descendant of a slave is. I went into therapy 10 years ago because I needed to work that out. I’ve gotten better. Everything about me is more fluid, much less rigid. I’m gonna do everything I can, feel everything I can, until it hurts. Then I’ll stop. All they did was buy us–it’s not an honor, it’s just something that happened. Our gifts belong to us."

"it doesn’t matter where I live. Just give me a room to write in."

"Robert Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls "a collective appetite for black male blood." Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers."

"No. I’m not trying to go away from anybody. I don’t go where my feelings get hurt. If you’re going to be nice to me, I’ll come."

"Multiculturalism is a white people joke. Black people have always been here as different. People need to stop saying that there is one way to be–and then the issue will disappear. I don’t tell Navajos they can’t speak Navajo. I don’t tell Asians they can’t eat noodles. Because black people have refused to eat potatoes and cabbage, white people are terrified. Now that we’re saying “I’m talkin’ Zulu, I’m changin’ my name, my child’s goin’ to a black school with Muslims,” white people get upset and have to call it something. Multiculturalism isn’t about culture, it’s about power."

"I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew-in the deepest parts of me-existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother-the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems-emotions which stem from the love of my mother. The reading was agitating. Made me uncomfortable. Threw me into a week-long terror of how deeply I was affected. I felt that I had to start all over again. That I turned only to the perceptions of white middle-class women to speak for me and all women. I am shocked by my own ignorance."