Stephen Vincent Benet
At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing.Collection: Writing
The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.Collection: Art
Since graveyards are often built over older burial grounds, I assume Dolores Park was probably an Indian, (an Ohlone) graveyard before that. I think the fact that it has so many layers underneath the contemporary one intrigues me.Collection: Thinking
American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.Collection: Art
The other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets.Collection: Thinking
I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.Collection: Writing
When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.Collection: School
The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day - no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms.Collection: Mixtures
I don't think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom's interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work - that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city.Collection: Thinking
Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.Collection: Writing
Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.Collection: Book
There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.Collection: New York
It's to a younger people's advantage to work with evolving computer technologies that provide so many ways to explore the use and distribution of text, including sound, images and motion.Collection: Technology
I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.Collection: Knowledge
And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust.Collection: Trust
Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!Collection: Art
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.Collection: Names
It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.Collection: Littles
Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls, Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars - They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble, Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy, That something new is coming to the world, The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming, And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.Collection: Stars
Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my bufdfalo have found me.Collection: Block
You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you'd better.Collection: Thinking
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.Collection: Tired
I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.Collection: Youth
If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.Collection: Country
Grant us a common faith that we shall know bread and peace-that we shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do our best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make.Collection: Faith
I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.Collection: Sky
A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst.Collection: Writing
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.Collection: Children
Occasionally I encounter people getting into their cars who will say, "Oh, you haven't been walking lately" - like I'm a symbol of the ancient art of walking!Collection: Art
I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.Collection: Book
I’ve been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she’d found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.Collection: Reading