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I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

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Marilyn Monroe Paulo Coelho Abraham Lincoln C. S. Lewis Khalil Gibran Charlie Chaplin Gautama Buddha Isaac Newton

All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
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There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
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Art Assume Blood Falsely Force Inspiration Possession Question Relation Song Supernatural Universal
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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Absolute Confusion Defeat Despair Failure Imagination Physical Response War
Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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Catering Controlling Erotic Guilt Heart Marble Mother Patriarchy Provoking Riddem Son
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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Amazement Both Complexity Confusion Daughter Mother
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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Artist Dishonoured Honor Legal People President
It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Count Few Hard Important People Way
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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