Take The Time To Write. You Can

Pound Described Poetry As Original Research In Language, And Just As Formal Experiment In Poetry Has To Try Things And Has To Go Too Far, So Does Experiment With Writing About Politics In Poetry And What The Politics Of Poetry Is.

The Thing I Learned Is That The Work Is Getting Done By People Who Dig In And Work On A Particular Project: The People Who Spend 20 Years Sustaining A Theater For Black Teenagers In Chicago; The People Who Reintroduce Sticklebacks Into Strawberry Creek In Berkeley And Then Wait Patiently For The First Egrets To Show Up.

When I Began Writing Poems, It Was In The Late 60s And Early 70s When The Literary And Cultural Atmosphere Was Very Much Affected By What Was Going On In The World, Which Was, In Succession, The Civil Rights Movement, The Antiwar Movement, And The Women's Movement In The 60s, 70s, And Into The Early 80s. And All Of Those Things Affected Me And Affected My Thinking, Particularly The Vietnam War.

Poetry Had In The Hands Of Various People Become A Place For Inconvenient Knowledge Insofar As It Was A Place For Knowledge At All. But It Was A Place Where You Could Talk About Other Kinds Of Experience Than The Official Version.

Fiction Writers Have Their Own World, And Poets Have Their Own World, And Literary Criticism Has Sort Of Passed Over Into Cultural Studies In The University, And So On. They Seem More Disconnected From Each Other Than They Did When I First Began To Write.