I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn’t have picked a better companion.
An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.
We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.
I’ll die propped up in bed trying to do a poem about America.
POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
Rest is not a word of free people. Rest is a monarchical word.
The woman named Tomorrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time.
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.
Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.
Time is a great teacher, Who can live without hope?
The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Always the path of American destiny has been into the unknown. Always there arose enough reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom to carry the nation through to a fresh start with ever-renewing vitality.
If I added to their pride of America, I am happy.
Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.
So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn’t live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.
My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.
Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.