There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.
I don’t want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.
Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
I am often asked why I write, and I don’t know really – I just want to.
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
I’m heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o’-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail.
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.
What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.
Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko’s art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
We might realize that the present moment may be one of an eternal or sempiternal series of moments, all of which will resemble it because, in some ways, they are the present, and won’t in other ways, because the present will be the past by that time.
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don’t see until It’s all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.
A perfect example of the new republic’s urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.