A Quote by William Jay Smith
I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.
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There are some singer-songwriters who start out as poets. So someone like Leonard Cohen wrote and published poetry in the early 60s, but then started writing songs. Bob Dylan's a poet in the sense of bard, aoidos or vates.
'Mean' is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.
Good home-school educational plans have the kids in groups with other children often and consistently. Because common sense dictates that isolating people is never good and home-schooled children really benefit from being in those type of programs.
My greatest sense of accomplishment has come from having two amazing sons, but it's also a paradox in that the times when I felt like the biggest failure have been times when I felt like, as a parent, I wasn't making the right decisions or succeeding in the way that I should.
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female,
you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.
My parents have worked their asses off their whole entire lives, they still do, and I never felt like anything would be handed to me. I never felt sorry for myself. I felt like, "Wow, this is incredible. I'm able to do this for myself." I think once you have that sense of empowerment at a young age and you allow your children to have that empowerment, it will fuel them for a lifetime.
I'm happy that I have my family, and I'm happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing's changed, really.
One thing about being a children's poet or a versifier, is that there is a large market for your wares. These things really made the rounds. I would meet people and they'd quote my poems to me. It's great.
I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.
Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
It would be hard to imagine Heaven without children. It wouldn't be Heaven! It would be a pretty boring place without children. What are we going to do, all get to be old people and then stagnate and that's the end of it? Once all those that are already born grow up, the place would really lack life without new generations of children! If there were no children, it would be a dead society.
What it felt to me was like the dissolution of my idea of myself. I felt like separateness evaporated. I felt this tremendous sense of oneness. I'm quite an erratic thinker, quite an adrenalized person, but through meditation, I found this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. My tendency towards selfishness, I felt that kind of exposed as a superficial and pointless perspective to have. I felt very relaxed, a sense of oneness. I felt love.
Every individual is in touch with the deeper level of being, the aware consciousness. If these humans form groups, they do not derive their sense of self from the group, which does not mean there cannot be a sense of being part of this group. But the group itself does not become an egoic entity.
There are times I think of us all and I wish we were back in second grade. Not really that young. But I wish it felt like second grade. I’m not saying everyone was friends back then. But we all got along. There were groups, but they didn’t really divide. At the end of the day, your class was your class, and you felt like you were a part of it. You had your friends and you had the other kids, but you didn’t really hate anyone longer than a couple of hours. Everybody got a birthday card. In second grade, we were all in it together. Now we’re all apart.
I was really blown away and inspired by everything that she [Audrey Hepburn] had done for children via and through UNICEF and I guess it really, really floored me in a way that I hadn't ever felt toward a public figure before. To see her kindness was inspiring and spoke to me as a person. She was so real and so elegant..I am also inspired by what Angelina Jolie is doing by traveling to places like Cambodia to help children by actually being there and being more involved.
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