There Are Either Poems About Sex/love Or

The Thing I Learned Is That The Work Is Getting Done By People Who Dig In And Work On A Particular Project: The People Who Spend 20 Years Sustaining A Theater For Black Teenagers In Chicago; The People Who Reintroduce Sticklebacks Into Strawberry Creek In Berkeley And Then Wait Patiently For The First Egrets To Show Up.

I Think That Poets Can Say, "what We Want Is For Everybody On Earth To Wake Up Free From Fear And With Access To Medicine And Clean Water And Education." But I Don't Think Poets Have Any Special Insight On How To Get There. And The 20th Century Is A Pretty Good Record Of That Because So Many Of The Great Poets Were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, Etc. They Wrote Their Odes To Lenin And Stalin. They Glorified Some Of The Most Violent And Grotesque Dictatorships Of The 20th Century. And A Lot Of The Ones Who Were Not Stalinists Were Fascists Or Fascist Sympathizers.

Poetry Is A Man Arguing With Himself; Rhetoric Is A Man Arguing With Others.

One Of The Interesting Things About The History Of Poetry In The 16th, 17th, And 18th Centuries Is That People Who Read Liked Getting Their Information In Rhyme Just As Much As In Prose. The Genre That We Would Think Of As Nonfiction Often Was Written In Verse In Forms Like The Georgic When People Thought That One Of The Tasks Of Poetry Was Conveying Arguments And Information In A Pleasant Way.

One Way To Escape The Universe In Which Everything Is A Kind Of Media Cartoon Is To Write About The Part Of Your Life That Doesn't Feel Like A Cartoon, And How The Cartoon Comes Into It.