I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.
Speaking
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.
A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.
To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is ‘actual song.’ That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself – it’s a little bit like singing, it’s a little bit like speaking.
Though actually the work of man’s hands – or, more properly speaking, the work of his travelling feet, – roads have long since come to seem so much a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the landscape no less natural than rocks and trees.
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
But what is drama? Broadly speaking, it is whatever by imitative action rouses interest or gives pleasure.