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.
You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you’d better.
Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my bufdfalo have found me.
The other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets.
As for what you’re calling hard luck – well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.
Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man’s memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.
When Daniel Boone goes by at night The phantom deer arise And all lost, wild America Is burning in their eyes.
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she’d found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.
If two New Hampshiremen aren’t a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory.
Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.
Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!
Occasionally I encounter people getting into their cars who will say, “Oh, you haven’t been walking lately” – like I’m a symbol of the ancient art of walking!
When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from “A” – particularly sections “22” and “23.” It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.
Basically when I’m walking I’m not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.
At first I was blogging everyday, but I don’t do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I’ll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it’ll just be new work that I’m doing.
Most of the time I’m not really attracted to writing that’s focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.
I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we’re walking in.
I don’t think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom’s interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work – that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city.
Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn’t write about as such.