Whenever it's suggested that our sponsors have some kind of influence or control of what we cover in some kind of censorship through financial pressure, it's rubbish. That's never happened.
A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.
The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.
What's love? Something that lasts a week or a month and that's all you can except? Or is it just that some loves have a short shelf life? You know, like yogurt: after a week or two they go bad. And how do you recognize the other kind of love, the kind that isn't like yogurt? The kind that's more like... I don't know, like peanut butter, that lasts forever and always tastes good?
Acting is doing, because everything you say or do is some kind of an action, some kind of a verb. You're always connected to the other person through some kind of action.
High school is what kind of grows you into the person you are. I have great memories, good and bad, some learning experiences and some that I'll take with me the rest of my life.
You may be good, but what are you good for? You've got to be good for something. You've got to be about some project, some task that requires you to be humble and obedient to the universal principles of service. You've got to live a life of complete and total integrity in order to give this kind of service. This integrity enables you to love other people unconditionally, to be courageous and kind at the same time, because you have integratedness inside your own soul.
We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.
I'm pretty shy. I'm so bad at public speaking. I can answer questions in front of a crowd, that seems to be fine, but standing up there by myself and delivering some kind of speech, I'm the worst. I hate it.
I think pretty much all people who love each other had some kind of thing at first sight. I mean, there has to be some kind of moment where you, like, feel a different energy around someone.
Writers that pretend to be in the throes of some kind of genius-demon, some kind of possessing spirit that refuses to let them engage with Normal Life are bullshit artists of the highest degree, looking to excuse their antisocial tendencies and bad manners away with a flourish of vocabulary and the semantic waving of hands.
There is no accurate or useful 'profile' of students who engage in targeted school violence. Some come from good homes, some from bad. Some have good grades, some bad.
Some people thrive under pressure, but pressure can also ruin your performance, it can push you down angles which you don't want to go.
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Some people are very dictatorial and it's not a good feeling, and it kind of inhibits you, because you feel like you have more to offer than what they're trying to squeeze you into, some kind of box or something like that.
It's not that kind of love. It's the real kind. The unconditional kind. The nonjudgemental kind. Not the physical kind. I love you as a fellow soul who inhabits this earth. I love you as a fellow immortal. I love you because I finally understand what made you the way you are. And if I could change it, I would. But I can't—so I choose to love you instead. And my hope is that my acceptance of you will spur you to do something good too, but if not—" I shrug. "At least I can say I tried.