What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Us
‘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.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
The questioning is a stupid formality aimed exclusively at preventing us from speaking at the demonstration.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused, but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.
Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.
There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.