In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Invent a new language anyone can understand.
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line’ editors; everything depends on the money.
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they’d been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.
Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
When you’re young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
I think if there’s a great depression there might be some hope.