The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.
Really
And, you know, money is – the money edge is really dangerous to democracy. Because what you have right now – people have said to me that, look, you’ll always be outspent, so how can you ever win?
If I’m working on a poem, it’s at the forefront of my mind; I’m working on it when I’m cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don’t really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn’t going to jell.
I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I’d been writing – really just for him – to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it’s where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.
If you look just at the decades after 1934, you know it’s hard to point to really inspired and positive support from outside of Haiti, to Haiti, and much easier to point to either small-minded or downright mean-spirited policies.
My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it… That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.
Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.
Companies understand that if their employees are sick, it’s really expensive. So despite the rhetoric I hear, thank God employers are still in the health-care system.
What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.
The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.