Poets From Canada

"‘Tell me something about your life, ‘he said. ‘My life?’ the rickshaw-wallah asked. ‘I do not have one.’"

"This day says nothing different to me than to you."

"Walking is always for tomorrow; yesterday’s walk, today’s walk, tomorrow’s walk – all for tomorrow. That is what this world is."

"People want to see you own something as precious so that they are assured that you are not going to steal from them. The richer the leader, the more respected he is."

"Imagine a day when this yard will be crowded with hundreds of leaders of the country. They will compete with each other, argue with each other, insult each other, throw shoes, leather bags, teacups, microphones and chairs at each other, break each other’s neck and determination, and then, at the end of the day, shamelessly compromise with each other for the sake of the party, and on the order of the leader."

"The taller the building, the better the view."

"‘So this is what famine does to a person,’ I thought as I walked back home. ‘It does not bring one to his knees only; it eats one alive. It is hungrier than a hungry man.’"

"There is no good or evil in the world. Only images."

"It is not mandatory, I thought, that a society must have people who are vile and who rear filthiness instead of grit and ambition."

"Suffering is not an otherworldly affair; it will never be that a person won’t be able to unearth the mystery of his suffering in his lifetime."

"Shoes could be sold and resold, unlike a Constitution."

"A man should have the right to choose his own shoes."

"Seventy million people will talk about seventy million solutions to the same problem."

"Oh ye! who all life's energies combine The fadeless laurel round your brows to twine, Pause but one moment in your brief career, Nor seek for glory in a mortal sphere."

"In shapeless clumps the ferns are brown and dead Among the fir-trees dusk is swiftly born: The maples will be desolate by morn The last word of the summer has been said"

"If there was a problem connected with my being a lesbian, even after I became aware of it, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn't know anybody else like me."

"We are returned to mystery and the power of cooperating with life—rather than, as so often now, working against it."

"Superficially, she suggested that she was a very respectable and demure maiden lady, but someone had put raven's blood in her mother's milk."

"We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist."

"the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives."

"Anarchism is a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus, while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine. This concern springs from the belief that anarchism is a manifestation of natural human urges, and that it is the tendency to create authoritarian institutions which is the transient aberration. If one accepts this view, then anarchism cannot merely be a phenomenon of the present; the aspect of it we perceive in history is merely one metamorphosis of an element constant in society."

"Orwell can only be understood as an essentially quixotic man. … He defended, passionately and as a matter of principle, unpopular causes. Often without regard to reason he would strike out against anything which offended his conceptions of right, justice and decency, yet, as many who crossed lances with him had reason to know, he could be a very chivalrous opponent, impelled by a sense of fair play that would lead to public recantation of accusations he had eventually decided were unfair. In his own way he was a man of the left, but he attacked its holy images as fervently as he did those of the right. And however much he might on occasion find himself in uneasy and temporary alliance with others, he was — in the end — as much a man in isolation as Don Quixote. His was the isolation of every man who seeks the truth diligently, no matter how unpleasant its implications may be to others or even to himself."

"When I die let the black rag fly raven falling from the sky."

"For out of black soul's night have stirred dawn's cold gleam, morning's singing bird. Let black day die, let black flag fall, let raven call, let new day dawn of black reborn."

""Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist," said Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of anarchism. Few doctrines or movements have been so confusedly understood in the public mind, and few have presented in their own variety of approach and action so much excuse for confusion."

"Anarchism, nihilism, and terrorism are often mistakenly equated, and in most dictionaries will be found at least two definitions of the anarchist. One presents him as a man who believes that government must die before freedom can live. The other dismisses him as a mere promoter of disorder who offers nothing in place of the order he destroys. In popular thought the latter conception is far more widely spread. The stereotype of the anarchist is that of the cold-blooded assassin who attacks with dagger or bomb the symbolic pillars of established society. Anarchy, in popular parlance, is malign chaos. Yet malign chaos is clearly very far from the intent of men like Tolstoy and Godwin, Thoreau and Kropotkin, whose social theories have all been described as anarchist. There is an obvious discrepancy between the stereotype anarchist and the anarchist as we most often see him in reality; that division is due partly to semantic confusions and partly to historical misunderstandings."

"Like such titles as Christian and Quaker, "anarchist" was in the end proudly adopted by one of those against whom it had been used in condemnation. In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that stormy, argumentative individualist who prided himself on being a man of paradox and a provoker of contradiction, published the work that established him as a pioneer libertarian thinker. It was What Is Property?, in which he gave his own question the celebrated answer: "Property is theft." In the same book he became the first man willingly to claim the title of anarchist. Undoubtedly Proudhon did this partly in defiance, and partly in order to exploit the word's paradoxical qualities. He had recognized the ambiguity of the Greek anarchos, and had gone back to it for that very reason — to emphasize that the criticism of authority on which he was about to embark need not necessarily imply an advocacy of disorder. The passages in which he introduces "anarchist" and "anarchy" are historically important enough to merit quotation, since they not merely show these words being used for the first time in a socially positive sense, but also contain in germ the justification by natural law which anarchists have in general applied to their arguments for a non-authoritarian society."

"Proudhon goes on to suggest that the real laws by which society functions have nothing to do with authority; they are not imposed from above, but stem from the nature of society itself. He sees the free emergence of such laws as the goal of social endeavour. … Proudhon conceiving a natural law of balance operating within society, rejects authority as an enemy and not a friend of order, and throws back at the authoritarians the accusations leveled at anarchists; in the process he adopts the title he hopes to have cleared of obloquy."

"Proudhon was a voluntary hermit in the political world of the nineteenth century. He sought no followers, indignantly rebuffed suggestions that he had created as system of any kind, and almost certainly rejoiced in the fact that he accepted the title anarchist in virtual isolation."

"It is the general idea put forward by Proudhon in 1840 that unites him with the later anarchists, with Bakunin and Kropotkin, and also with certain earlier and later thinkers, such as Godwin, Stirner, and Tolstoy, who evolved anti-governmental systems without accepting the name of anarchy; and it is in this sense that I shall treat anarchism, despite its many variations: as a system of social thought, aiming at fundamental changes in the structure of society and particularly — for this is the common element uniting all its forms — at the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental cooperation between free individuals."

"Because anarchism is in its essence an anti-dogmatic and unstructured cluster of related attitudes, which does not depend for its existence on any enduring organization, it can flourish when circumstances are favourable and then, like a desert plant, lie dormant for seasons and even for years, waiting for the rains that will make it burgeon. Unlike an ordinary political faith, in which the church-party becomes the vehicle of the dogma, it does not need a movement to carry it forward…"

"While we can doubtless look to some wide changes in the shapes of social relationships as a result of contemporary libertarian movements, and especially to an increase in workers' involvement in decision-making at the place of work and in the development of forms of democracy more direct and more sensitive to modern conditions, it is unlikely that the general outcome will be the wholly non-governmental society of which libertarians now and in the past have dreamed. The value of anarchism is likely to remain primarily in its force as an inspiring idea, an activating vision…"

"Gandhi on many occasions declared himself an anarchist — of his own kind — and he created, partly from his readings of Tolstoy and Kropotkin and partly on the basis of Indian communitarian traditions, the plan of a decentralized society based on autonomous village communes."

"Gandhi was a completely unofficial man. He recognized the gulf that lay between the enjoyment of freedom and the exercise of authority. When the Indian National Congress, which he had led intermittently as a movement dedicated to achieving liberation by legal and extra‑legal means, itself grasped for power and became a political party, he withdrew. With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time."

"Much in his career remains unexplained if we forget his insistence that religion and politics were bound inextricably in the common search for Truth. "To me," he said, "Truth is God and there is no way to find Truth except the way of nonviolence." Truth conceived as God is of course the Absolute. Truth perceived by man must always be relative, changing according to human contacts developing as men understand better each other, their circumstances and themselves. Gandhi never set out to develop a fixed and final doctrine, but emphasized that his practice of ahimsa, or nonviolence, was always experimental, that his political struggle like his personal life was part of a continuing quest for Truth as manifested existentially, a quest that could never end because human understanding was incapable of comprehending the Absolute. The identification of Truth as the goal of political action, as well as of religious devotion, and the refusal to distinguish between religion and politics, form the background to the great divergences between Gandhi's revolutionary ideas and techniques and those of other contemporary revolutionists … Unorthodox though he might be, Gandhi fitted into the traditional pattern of the sanyassi who practices non‑attachment in the search for Truth; he was the karma yogin, the man who perfects and purifies himself through action. Yogic disciplines of all kinds are held in India to confer power over destiny, and Gandhi believed that positive action — love and nonviolence — could intangibly influence men and therefore events. With Truth as the goal and at the same time as the principle of action (for in Gandhian terms ends are emergent from means and hence virtually indistinguishable from them), there was no place in Gandhi's idea of revolution for conspiratorial methods or guerrilla activities."

"Throughout his long life, George Woodcock stressed the primacy of the moral over the political and steadfastly defended the natural human tendency to rebel against artificial restraints. He never doubted Kropotkin' s confidence in mutual aid and the great maxims of Proudhon continued to guide him until the end: "Anarchy is Order" but "Property is Theft"."

"All the diamonds in this world That mean anything to me Are conjured up by wind and sunlight sparkling on the sea I ran aground in a harbor town Lost the taste for being free Thank God he sent some gull chased ship To carry me to sea..."

"Last Night of the World"

"If this were the last night of the world What would I do What would I do that was different Unless it was champagne with you..."

"I want to raise every voice At least I got to try Every time I think about it Water rises to my eyes Situation desperate Echoes of the victims cry If I had a rocket launcher If I had a rocket launcher If I had a rocket launcher Some son of a bitch would die"

"Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight you got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight"

"These fragile bodies of touch and taste This vibrant skin, this hair like lace Spirits open to the thrust of grace Never a breath you can afford to waste, when you're Lovers in a dangerous time Lovers in a dangerous time..."

"Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by?"

"Had another dream about the lions at the door They were not half as frightening as they were before But I'm thinking about eternity Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me Walls, windows, trees, waves coming through You be in me I'll be in you Together in eternity Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me Up among the firs where it smells so sweet Or down in the valley were the river used to be I got my mind on eternity Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me, and I'm Wondering where the lions are and I'm Wondering where the lions are..."

"Catching the light and falling into dark And the world fades out like an overheard remark... In the falling dark"

"[What Poets Say:]"

"Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)"

"The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)"

"Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)"

"I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized. (18.23)"