If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
Still
In the Seventies, we still had dreams and hopes of Utopia, but by the end of the decade, the world had shifted to the right.
‘Memory.’ ‘Race.’ ‘Murder.’ That’s what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I’m grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.
He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.
Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.