There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
Some
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
I don’t think I’ve worked with anyone where I haven’t seen some progress. Now sometimes you can’t take someone where they want to go, not all the way, and sometimes you stop, and they do it or don’t do it on their own thereafter.
The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.
I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn’t really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don’t want to solve problems in poems that haven’t been solved in the world.
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
When you are skinning your customers, you should leave some skin on to grow again so that you can skin them again.
I greatly fear some of America’s greatest and most dangerous enemies are such as think themselves her best friends.
If dysfunction means that a family doesn’t work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners – the whole enchilada.
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.