A Quote by John Cooper Clarke
Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.
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Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.
My whole life I saw everybody else get shine, I saw everybody else get money, everybody else wanted to rap. I saw them getting record deals and stuff like that. And everytime I saw that it was damn, I can't wait until my time.
When the band first formed, everybody had been sidemen. So they said, 'In this band there are no sidemen,' and when I joined the band, it was still the same. There were some power struggles emerging, because Henley and Frey had sung all the hits at that point.
When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her, and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable.
It was about 105 degrees in Chicago. And that's a time when everybody gets tired. I came into the clubhouse, and everybody was sitting around, and I said, 'Beautiful day. Let's play two!' And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There were a couple of writers around, and they wrote that, and it stayed with me.
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
The Beatles weren't like any other band. Everybody in the band sang, which is why you knew everybody in the band.
The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.
If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. Good for you, La Rouchefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read.
Crime is based upon need, making money. People sell drugs to make money. But if everybody is cared for, they don't sell drugs and if there's no money you can't sell drugs even if you wanted to. There'd be no such thing as gambling, prostitution, or selling out, or paying off a senator or a governor. There are no senators, there are no governors so you can't pay them off. If you take away the basis or the condition that generate abhorrent behavior, you don't have abhorrent behavior.
The backstage stuff is not for everybody. I'm very hands on; I like to train and teach young guys now because there's so many of them. There are certain ways to do things, to get crowd reactions and sell your emotions and sell stories.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
All my teammates, everybody, they trust me and empower me. I just wanna thank them for allowing me to lead them. And then my family, my wife, my son, everybody, like everybody, has played a part in helping me continue to become the best version of me on and off the court.
I've never been a huge Zeppelin fan, much to the chagrin of everybody else in my former band. But certainly those Pink Floyd records, I was really into them, especially 'Dark Side of the Moon.'
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
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