Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you’re good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things.
The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.
I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel’s heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.
And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.
There’s nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
Life was a storm to wander through.
Even in hell, if a man was a man, you’d know it.
It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.
The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day – no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms.
I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.
Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.
Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell’s broke loose in Georgia.
Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.
I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.
One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Remember that when you say “I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,” you have denied America with that word.
I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.