A man whose eyes love opens risks his soul - His dancing breaks beyond the mind's control.
I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.
I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.
The West is anxious about becoming another Africa, and it has dug deep moats in the hopes of preventing that, but it's too late: it has already become another Africa.
In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.
That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land, and my poetry is a versification of that personal history. History is all I have.
I came to poetry at fourteen, in the middle of a booming oil-rush town in southern Arabia without a single public library: Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. All the wealth in the world and not a single intelligent idea as to how to employ it.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
Witness protection just makes for exciting stories and it's a really rich sort of place to grab stories from. . . people starting over completely, saying goodbye to their lives before. . . it never ends in terms of story opportunities.
I'm not necessarily one to be remembered as a great, great speaker in wrestling, but I want to share my feelings about the people who have influenced me over the course of my career.
The way we treat people we disagree with most is a report card on what we've learned about love.