It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.
Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.
If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web.
If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist.
Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.
We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?
Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.
I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.
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.
My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.
The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer's attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers, and - to put it into Microsoft parlance - customers.
Everybody likes new shoes! It is a new feeling, going onto the pitch, so it is great to be able to wear them straight out of the box. They are comfortable straight away and move with you. I could not do that with my old shoes. So every time I have a big match, I want new shoes straight out of the box.
What's the number-one thing people do on the Web? They read. Words and numbers are the raw material from which the vast majority of webpages are built. If reading is the primary activity on the Web, then readability is a primary function of Web design.
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.
Instead of trying to fit an impossible ideal, I took a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful: Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours.