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 type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’
Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.
Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.
Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.
In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.