A Quote by Derek Walcott
I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
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Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
I felt like, I need to do English music; I speak better English than I do Korean. I think the fans enjoy it as well, so let's start making music in English.
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
I write in English first, and then I translate to Spanish. I've always felt more comfortable with the English side of things first.
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.
I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.
"Stupid English."
"English isn't stupid," I say.
"Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me."
"Why not?"
"He says lunch isn't a subject."
I glance at him. "It isn't."
"Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?"
A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.
I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
'Say Her Name' was a book I never wanted to write and never expected to write. I wasn't trying to do anything except write a book for Aura - a book that I thought I had to write.
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