And while I’m lobbing around so many crass generalizations, here’s one more: All of us are beholden to some larger tyranny or coercion, real or imagined, that is ever ready to crush us.
Instead of writing about a heyday of a culture or a scene or a place, I wanted to land in the aftermath. I wanted to see what was going on those doldrums.
Progressive politics and privilege butting heads: that’s sort of where I like to live when I’m writing.
Did Congress know that as a result of Sputnik we were going to have a deconstruction-mad America?
I knew that I was going to talk about abuse, I wanted to leave it on the page, action by action, without much reflection.
Most of us make poetry from life, but the Paneros insisted on making life from poetry.
“The daydream emerged as such an unbidden gift.”
In life, like love, or the shape of a story itself, time is fast and slow at once, compressed and expanded; it is never as simple or singular as a minute is long.
I do sometimes feel that reading and writing is a way of preparing oneself [for death], as much as a person can be prepared.
It’s fun to see people talk about revolution seriously, because they can’t imagine anything else anymore and it’s starting to enter the consciousness.