The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
Poems aren't postcards to send home.
There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
If I could blame it on all the mothers and fathers of the world, they of the lessons, the pellets of power, they of the love surrounding you like batter. . . Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes? No, I'll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. The stars (possibly) are safe. At least for the moment. The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box.
The antidote to frustration is a calm faith, not in your own cleverness, or in hard toil, but in God's guidance.
Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say 'conservative' the way people say 'child molester. '
Men often bear little grievances with less courage than they do large misfortunes.
America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.