Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
Had
Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, he had not the method of making a fortune.
The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.
Four years earlier I had been selected, with Kay Boyle, the writer, and a number of others, to go to Cambodia and come back and prove that there were no sanctuaries in that country.
McCarthy had ten years in the House of Representatives, only two terms as a senator. What did he pass? Are there any bills or any piece of legislation that he’s identified with? Not at all.
We don’t actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don’t know exactly when it was written.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that’s compounded by a factor of trillions.
I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of ‘Pro Femina.’ So I had a stamp made that said ‘irony, irony, irony’ to put on a postcard and mail it back.
What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we’ve ever had before.
I started reading seriously after I was in college. I read comic books. I read every ‘Power Man’ and ‘Iron Fist’ that ever came out. I had a teacher introduce me to poetry, and that kind of woke me up.