The masses don’t shed their blood for the benefit of a few individuals.
Category Archive: 1941
I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.
There’s something contagious about demanding freedom.
Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don’t write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.
You don’t talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.
The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
What the Super Bowl did for us was give us a sense of urgency.
We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.