Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
{ } I do so wish, that, in all these big questions, literary men would take more for a guide than they do, or seem to do. You have, of course, an immense constituency; but your love of letters and your deeply poetic spirit render you worthy of a far ...
Terence: We wrote one last night outside the mini mart. Morris called it "Stuart Drives A Comfortable Car" and then like in country songs, you know, in parentheses it says "There's Usually Someone in the Trunk." And, and um, I came up with a tune jus...
What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anyth...
. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing a...
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astoni...
We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin-who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that He created man in His image. So man is something wo...
The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them tha...
After years studying informality in Nigeria, Dutch architect and planner Rem Koolhaas reach the same conclusion. In the West, he writes, “there’s a sense of infinite choice, but a very conventional set of options from which to choose.” By contr...
I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of ev...
Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the fore...
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generaliz...
It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and privat...
But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy ...
