If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Category Archive: April 26
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It’s easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
From the catbird seat, I’ve found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
When kids look at broccoli, they call it ‘little trees,’ because they see it not just for the word ‘broccoli.’ They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.
The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.
Back when I was in college, people used to talk about the alienation of the artist, not ever quite fitting in any place.
I’ve been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do – to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.