Despite his condition, [Mattie] Stepanek was upbeat, saying he didn't fear death. His work was full of life, a quest for peace, hope and the inner voice he called a "heartsong."

"It's our inner beauty, our message, the songs in our hearts," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in November 2001. "My life mission is to spread peace to the world."

from The My Hero Project: Mattie Stepanek, Poet, Advocate, Dies

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[Masani Alexis] DeVeaux points to her [Audre Lorde's] protest of the cooptation of black American culture by an indifferent white population, public apathy toward Atlanta's murdered but "expendable" black children, the displacement of the poor and homeless, the escalating arms race, "insufferable unemployment," the U.S. brutality in Central America, the American invasion of Granada, which broke her heart: ". . . who will say/you have killed my country/what does a conquered people tell their tormenters/clothed & armed & buckled . . .," Lorde writes.

from University at Buffalo Reporter: DeVeaux publishes Audre Lorde biography

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The church bells that inspired the poet A E Housman to write Bredon Hill, part of his collection from A Shropshire Lad, are ringing again, having been silent for 80 years.

from telegraph.co.uk: Housman's bells ring again at Bredon

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We've been talking about Peeping Tom in the office recently. Made think about Tennyson's Godiva:

And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peep'd -- but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivel'd into darkness in his head,
And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait
On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misused . . .

from The London News Review: Great Peeping Toms of English Poetry

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Callman Rawley, a Minneapolis resident from 1945 to 1979 who published widely acclaimed poems under his birth name, Carl Rakosi, died Thursday at his home in San Francisco. He was 100.

from Star Tribune: Callman Rawley, poet, dies

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"But the truth is that I do recall the genesis of the poems, Cecil [Day Lewis] coming into the room holding the first draft. It was so exciting and I do miss it terribly. When you live with a poet, if you see that they are not really with you, that they are light years away, far from feeling - 'Oh goodness, he's not with me and we're having a dinner party tonight' - you know he is doing what is his vocation. There is no other word for it. I always got the poems hot off the typewriter, the new baby as it were." [Jill Balcon]

from Independent.co.uk: Poem of the Day

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What makes his paeans more poignant is that he [Ivor Gurney] refuses to overestimate achievement:

With all that power he died, having done his nothing . . .
And none of us are safe against such terrible proving
That time puts on men--Such power shown; so little done . . .
Then the earth shut him out from the light of the sun.

("Christopher Marlowe")

In the end, it seems, he just couldn't believe: in God, in others, in himself, or even in his own poems.

from The Guardian: On the edge

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Francis Bacon, the writer and philosopher, has been the subject of one of the most long-running arguments in English literature--the Baconian controversy--which still has its followers.

Likewise, the playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe has also emerged as one of the leading names in the great debate.

Other figures put forward as the "real" Shakespeare have included writer Ben Jonson, the nobleman Sir Walter Raleigh and even Queen Elizabeth I.

from BBC News: Much ado about Shakespeare

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[Hugh] McArthur said Dumbarton, which means fortress of the Britons, was called Castello Artutius, or Arthur's Castle in the 11th century.

He said, "There are about seven places called Arthur's Seat in Scotland and I'm up to about 40 Arthur places names in Scotland.

"And locals will tell you that Loch Lomond used to be called the Lake."

from ic Wales: The Western Mail: Disbelief as Scots claim Arthur

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The most moving works of art are always those in which passion is confined within a severe formal scheme. The artists of the seventeenth century hoped, by throwing off formal restraint, by exploiting technical resources to their utmost limit, to make their works more moving and passionate. They achieved the exact opposite; and, compared with the works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, theirs are uninteresting and even, positively, unexciting. The bello of today, being still further from the great tradition, is still less interesting. [Aldous Huxley]

from The New Republic: "Bello Bello"

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This group, the Sepah Boland Mohammad is one who slanders both the government and Islam. An Islam that condones killing is not in our realm. What have I done to deserve death? What did the others do to deserve death? What crimes have they committed? There are 67 individuals that they have targeted. I don't really care about such a threat. Even if I die, I have done my work. I have left my mark in the history of Iran. But this type of killing is not what Islam's message is. It is not what our religion is all about. [Simin Behbahani]

from Payvand: Banouyeh Iran: A heart-to-heart with poet Simin Behbahani

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After Islam, scientists and jurists, rather than poets, came to define the world. And as usual, shifting the epistemological paradigm from one based on metaphor and led by poets to one based on truth led by "scientists" had some catastrophic implications.

When Al-Asha al-Bahili claimed to be taught by Mizhal the jinni, the only thing he expected from his audience was to marvel at the mystery of his words, he did not demand them to believe in them as truth.

from The Daily Star: Jinn, poets, scientists and epistemological truth

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[Allama] Iqbal was a poet-philosopher born in what is now Pakistan. His poetical works in Urdu and Persian easily earn him the title to the greatest poet in each of these languages in the twentieth century.

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Iqbal/Alam, Krieger, Albert

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Look at (don't listen to) the tension this verse from "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" accrues as Dylan keeps putting off a sense of a concluded rhyme scheme, wanting the metrical door to stay open:

My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can't buy her

Come on. That's poetry.

from Newsday: Another side of Bob Dylan

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During his lifetime, he was one of the country's most famous poets. But in the visitor's center at the homestead, Gonzales points to an upper shelf of a gift rack where there stand a dozen or so collections of [William Cullen] Bryant's poems. They are all used books, the most recent dating back to the 1940s. Gonzales says she buys them on the Internet and resells them because she just can't find Bryant in a current edition anywhere. This despite the fact that his poems are still anthologized in schoolbooks and poetry collections.

from Valley Advocate: Bryant Beckons

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The rural Australia [John] Kinsella describes must be perceived by [Harold] Bloom and many overseas critics as an exotic and violent New World - "white cockatoos, strangled / in telegraph wire, hang / dry and upside down".

Many of Kinsella's poems maximise the impact of a scene or image by reworking it from every angle. "For me there aren't definitive verities - it has to be cumulative. Perhaps because of drugs, I distrust what I see and hear."

from The Age: Harvesting memories

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Tommy [McHugh] describes his thinking as split minded. "It's like memories are jigsaw patterns for me. I can get a bit of it and fit it together and it will fall apart. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff with the brick underneath your feet crumbling."

He says his creativity is the same.

"It's like Mount Etna exploding. Fairy liquid bubbles of intelligence and they are popping around me all the time - grabbing one and trying to remember it before it floats away, popping."

from BBC News: Creative side unlocked by stroke

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"I think poets are kind of wild and unteachable," [Kay] Ryan said, "I see how creative writing programs can create an interest in poetry and maybe a market for it, but I don't see how they can encourage poetry in the deepest sense."

from Canada.com: Kay Ryan wins $100G poetry prize

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"Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ's sake, amen.".

In 1929, Dorothy Parker went to France, went on the wagon and wrote prodigiously. As the writing piled up, she wondered how much of it was rotten. Hoping that at least some of the pages would be good enough for a novel, she composed the above prayer.

from San Francisco Chronicle: The lives of the party

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How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. [Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell]

from Swans Commentary: Letters to a Young Poet (Letter Eight)

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In some sense, skepticism, just like ardor or passion, can only and always get you to the point where you have to relinquish it. Passionate poets who don?t relinquish their passion at some point never get to the poem, either. They get swirled away at the last moment by their own ardor. And skepticism is like that, too. I think the ultimate poem is a poem of belief. A poem of faith. And in some sense, even when you have a bitter, tragic poem, faith is expressed simply in the full recognition of the tragic element. [--Vijay Seshadri]

from The New Yorker: A Poet of Belief

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Generals and presidents approach war as a vast struggle. But war, at its most achingly real, happens not to armies, but to individuals.In my contest for Iraq war poetry, the most moving focused on individual tiles rather than the larger mosaic.

Here are the grand winners (www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds has more poems) [. . .]

from The New York Times: The Art of War

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[Sergeant Joe Lee's] poetry is particularly outstanding in its range and its immediacy. "[Wilfred] Owen and [Siegfried] Sassoon?s work is full of angst, they rail against the war," says [Bob] Burrows. "Lee?s poems are capsules of what happened: the tanks and dug-outs, the Indian soldiers - he is the only poet to write about them. He writes in the trenches while battle is raging. In one poem he actually mentions the bullets hitting the wall while he?s writing. Yet surrounded by the stench and the filth and the gore of decaying bodies, he can write so vividly about the sea that you feel it on your face."

from The Scotsman: Scotland's forgotten war poet

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If properly placed, this image will express a real moment (which is the reason you cannot "make up" haiku), and it will not explain or tell about feeling but, rather, it will "show the feeling through the image." A result will be a sudden connection (she describes it as "an 'ah' moment") when we feel or understand something we had not before.

To achieve this, the image must speak for itself. Do not use the word "like" or "as" in a comparison, do not use "sad" or "beautiful" because they only explain, they don't show.

from The Japan Times: Things as they are, not how they seem

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One of the most outspoken critics has been Ira Sadoff, a poet and professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who once declared that sound and meter were "poetic decorations" that got in the way of - or worse, masked the absence of - poetic vision.

"I haven't mellowed," he said this week from Maine. "I've always liked some good poems in form," but for him, there's too much in fixed-form poetry that "promotes dead white males, and some live ones, whose poetry is often deadly."

On the other side of the debate are the formalists, who say it's free verse that too often masks a lack of skill, too often amounts to little more than self-absorbed thumb-sucking.

from Philadelphia Inquirer: Good time for poets who rhyme

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[Christopher] Ricks, surely aware of the oddness of his enterprise--the elevation of a member of the Traveling Wilburys to a place among the greatest poets in the English language--has anticipated not only the possible resistance of his usual readership to his subject at hand, but also the probable unfamiliarity with his aims and methods in the potential new readership he will have attracted. ''Most people who are likely to read this book will already know what they feel about [Bob] Dylan, though they might not always know quite why they feel it or what they think,'' is how he opens the book, with typical brio and warmth.

from The New York Times: 'Dylan's Visions of Sin': It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading)

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The first was still attached to the traditional form of the poem and was led by Arab jurists and scholars who still believed in the superiority of the Bedouin Arabic culture, and politically advocated the power of the Arab caliph over the power of his Persian ministers and administrators.

On the other hand Abu Nawwas, a friend of the Persian house of Barmak, ministers of al-Rashid, used to write in another vein. He started his poems glorifying liquor, a direct attack against tradition; moreover he would openly attack the weeping of tents, the description of camels and anything that comes from the desert.

from The Daily Star (www.dailystar.com): Abu Nawwas, the Persian Arab

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"[. . . .] We didn't have close relations with our Arab neighbors, but the relations we did have with them were shaped by a mixture of strangeness and intimacy. From a naive, child's point of view, we certainly didn't feel any hostility or fear. There was a fence around Elkana that had a hole in it, and the hole was used to cross over both ways."

That relationship remains prominent in [Eliaz] Cohen's most recent poems, in which the biblical figure of Ishmael comes up repeatedly (see box).

"My longing for the lost Ishmael is the same longing I feel towards the lost Palestinian brother. Some interpreters think of Ishmael's expulsion as a trial from God that Abraham did not withstand. I still try to think of them as a partner. I don't believe the majority of Palestinian mothers want their children to become martyrs."

from Jerusalem Post: Writing beyond the Green Line

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[Stanley Kunitz] walked through the house and placed his hand on the back door. "I remember planting a pear tree in the garden," he told the Stockmals. The tree still bears fruit. That fall, and every one since, the Stockmals sent Kunitz a box of his own pears. His poem, "My Mother's Pears," is dedicated to them.

The poet didn't have a happy youth. His father had committed suicide two months before Stanley's birth, drinking carbolic acid in Crompton Park. His mother never spoke of it again. She remarried, but her second husband died in the Woodward Avenue house after collapsing while hanging drapes on Armistice Day, 1918. After that, Stanley and his mother lived alone on the first floor; his two sisters resided in the second-floor unit. He remembers, in his poem "The Three Floors," listening to one of his sisters play Tchaikovsky's "Warum" on the piano.

from The Boston Globe: A Worcester three-family unites its poetic son and the couple who came to love it as he did

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Rushdie ended his article on Hobson-Jobson with a play on the last words spoken by Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind: 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.' It deserves to be quoted in full:

'To spend a few days with Hobson-Jobson is, almost, to regret the passing of the intimate connections that made this linguistic kedgeree possible. But then one remembers what sort of connection it was, and is moved to remark--as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O'Hara--'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a small copper coin weighing one tolah, eight mashas and seven surkhs, being the fortieth part of a rupee.' Or, to put it more precisely, a dam.'

Ha ha ha!

I can't end my piece that well--just not that good a writer--and so I'm going to simply end with an Edward Lear poem first published in Times of India, July 1874.

from The Daily Star (www.thedailystar.net): Stray Thoughts on the Hobson-Jobson

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"For during that period I published no poetry at all. Someone years back had compared me to Rimbaud, too large a comparison to be sustained by my work. But I have often thought, over those 17 years, that perhaps I was like Rimbaud in one sense. I have never believed Rimbaud abandoned poetry, rather that poetry abandoned him. When he was approached, long after he had stopped writing, at the age of 19, by a number of young French poets for new work, he said, "I have done with that rubbish". This was what I constantly said to people who approached me . . . In 1982 something happened to me which I cannot account for. I not only started to write poetry once more, but a new style seemed to come to me without my ever trying to master it."

[-- Dom Moraes]
Collected Poems, 1987

from Outlook India: Gone Away

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What sets the climax of the Illiad in motion is the killing of Achilles' beloved companion, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector--another loss, but this time one that propels the sulky hero back into vengeful action. Fueled, no doubt, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings--by classical times, the debate wasn't so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as rather, as in Plato's Symposium, who was doing just what to whom--Benioff makes Patroclus Achilles' "cousin," a bizarre choice that (particularly in an era when family ties have never counted for less) has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching Troy, you'd think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage. "He killed my cousin!" Achilles shrieks at Priam when the latter comes begging for his son's body at the end of the story. "You've lost your cousin, now you've taken mine," a mournful Briseis (in this version, Hector's cousin) tells Achilles. "When does it end?" This film's notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one's collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making.

from The New York Review of Books: A Little Iliad

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Relax, Trekkies. To you, it might conjure up an image of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and crew zipping through space at warp factor 5, but the Next Generation I'm referring to are far more terrestrial. They're poets! Twenty of them, to be precise. Their mission - to boldly take poetry to far-flung corners of the universe or, failing that, to give readings at festivals and events throughout the country, advertising the merits of contemporary British poetry and hopefully shifting a few units into the bargain. [--Simon Armitage, Life on the line]

from The Guardian: Next Generation Poets 2004

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Over three months a little more than a year ago, [Louise] Gluck guided [Spencer] Reece through a series of rewrites. They'd work in the morning for a couple of hours by telephone and then he would drive to work in his Neon.

The ending of the title poem went through 20 versions before everything fell into place with the line "Snow falls like rice." The image provided just the right echo of the marriage theme from Chaucer's original "Clerk's Tale."

Having deemed it ready, Gluck steered the title poem to Alice Quinn, the poetry editor at the New Yorker, who in June gave the poem the entire back page of its debut fiction issue.

When Quinn called with the news, Reece had a mouth full of pins as he tried to tailor the seat of a customer's pants.

from The Washington Post: The Poet in Retail

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Some of his [Cyprian Kamil Norwid's] verse, like [Emily] Dickinson's, is easily accessible. Yet a curious spirit always hangs over it, safeguarding the poet's fundamental originality, like the inexplicable scent of violets when one pulls out a drawer. "My Country" is an example of this. Here Norwid's poetry attains a grandeur that, like Chopin's music, is not achieved by deploying a hundred-strong orchestra equipped with kettle-drums, but through the use of certain cross-border harmonies that make the listener proud to be a native of Europe and a product of her culture:

Those who say my country means:
Meadows, flowers and fields of wheat,
Hamlets and trenches--must confess
These--are her feet. [...]

from The Guardian: Longing for nobility

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Eugene Ruggles, a celebrated Petaluma poet credited with turning poetry readings into big happenings, has died.

Ruggles, 68, passed away Thursday at the turn-of-the-century Petaluma Hotel, where he had lived for the past 15 years in a small room crowded with the books he loved.

In 1977, Ruggles received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for a collection of poems titled "Lifeguard in the Snow."

from Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Petaluma poet, advocate Eugene Ruggles dies

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"It would be very odd," said James Fenton in a lecture on poetry a few years ago, "to go to a concert hall and discover that the pianist on offer wasn't any good at all, in the sense that he couldn't actually play the piano. But in poetry this is an experience we've learnt to take in our stride." No wonder there are pleas to hand the whole thing over to the professionals. If poets can't be trusted with their own work, the argument goes, then actors must take over.

It's an approach that's widely used in radio, and for the odd posh fundraiser, but one that's largely frowned on by the poetry world itself.

from Independent.co.uk: No one gets out awake

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What makes folks drive all the way out to the Chatanika Gold Dredge? "Poets," like other humans, "have a need to get together with their own kind," Cole says. And when they do, you never quite know what to expect.

Susan Campbell's poem about spring brought sighs, nods and smiles to the audience at this year's Dredge Poetry Festival.

from Anchorage Daily News: Poets come together at annual Dredge Festival

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[Alice] Walker has earned many accolades for her writing, but she's also had her share of critics. When someone at the Hongik University lecture on Saturday asked her how women who are trying to express themselves can deal with criticism, Ms. Walker said, "Try to think of it as creation, rather than promotion." She also said she never reads reviews of her books.

The act of creating is what's important, she said. "I bet the feeling of a person owning Van Gogh's painting is not comparable to the artist's while painting it."

from JoongAng Daily: Sisterly encouragement in Seoul

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Gentle readers, you have always heard that action speaks louder than words. I believe that statement to be true, however, I also believe that many times it is the words that cause the action. Words are our conduit to express what our emotions are at a given point and time and they are, of course, the way we communicate. I am going to attempt to place selected words in such a manner that you can understand my feelings about cowboys (cowgirls) in the purest sense.

from the Fence Post: Words

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The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle--the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour and concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to do that. [--Ralph Waldo Emerson]

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: On Art --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Alexander Gilchrist died at the age of 33. His great biography of [William] Blake, his labour of love, had been wonderfully researched and written. But it was unfinished.

With her peculiar force and independence, Anne Gilchrist immediately determined to finish the biography for him. Less than a week after Alexander's death, she wrote to Macmillan on December 6 1861: "I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the Book. I was his amanuensis."

She packed up his papers, returned a mass of borrowed pictures and manuscripts, refused Jane's invitation to move in with the Carlyles, and took the children and the unfinished book down to a clapboard cottage in tiny village of Shottermill, a mile from Haslemere in Sussex.

from The Guardian: Saving Blake

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An etcher, printer, and poet, [William] Blake's tastes ran contrary to the inclinations of his time. While philosophers and writers of the eighteenth century set store by rationalism and science, Blake valued the imagination: "I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create." And whereas a Neo-classical formality and artifice were the reigning aesthetic, Blake looked to the Bible and Milton. Above all, he believed that the poet is a mystic visionary whose inspiration arises from within. "

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's," he wrote. He prized Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser, and collected prints of Dürer, Raphael, and Michelangelo--all of whom were unpopular at the time.

from Humanities Magazine: William Blake: Visions and Verses

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When the poet David Lehman chose to title his book about the New York School of Poets "The Last Avant-Garde," he had a point; the point being that an avant-garde needs a mainstream tradition to be "avant" of and that the canonical New York School grouping of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler had not only pushed the limits of language as far they could be pushed, but had pushed the project of pushing into the mainstream itself. It is, at this point, no longer possible to establish one's poetic legitimacy by being more experimental or irreverent toward the tradition than your predecessors; you can't go further than those guys have already gone. Ezra Pound's command that poets must "make it new!" was itself, once, a new idea. But by now, all the new ideas are really kind of old.

from San Francisco Chronicle: Poets' new ideas seem awfully familiar

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I am also suspicious of [Dana] Gioia’s distinction of "literary poetry" from "popular poetry." How "literary" was the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Blake, in the eyes of the cultural elitists of their times? Not very. Frost and Cummings were popular poets; were they therefore not literary? Perhaps such headings are useful, in a general way, but the best popular poetry and even popular song lyrics have a way of eventually priming the Western Canon.

from Useless-Knowledge.com: The Highest Atoll

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But he was also one of the first Italians to champion vernacular poetry, an enterprise that most of his educated contemporaries took little interest in or actively disdained. And in the long run it was Petrarch's Italian verses that made him a literary figure of immense celebrity and importance, not only in Italy but in distant lands. In many places he was frequently credited with having invented the sonnet. This was an exaggeration, yet he made this form so much his own that, in many ways, he might just have well have done.

The influence of Petrarch's poetry was not merely a matter of form, but even more so of content, not only a way of writing, but also a manner of thinking.

from International Herald Tribune: Petrarch, the first humanist

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The Whitsun Weddings, for example, opens with "Here," a generous description of Hull and its suburbs, then zeroes in on "Mr. Bleaney," the most famous and most depressing of [Philip] Larkin's alter egos, a lonely bachelor in a rented room.

It should be no surprise that the man who wrote "The Importance of Elsewhere" wrote both to attract readers and to push them away, to justify his solitude and to assuage it. This author who feared commitment in his life sought to juxtapose charm and venom, sympathy and self-isolating acerbity, in all he wrote.

from Slate: The Poet of Dirty Words

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Asked about the audience she imagines when writing criticism, Helen [Vendler] says she thinks of it as the poet--�What I would hope is that if Keats read what I had written about the ode ‘To Autumn,’ he would say, ‘Yes, that is the way I wanted it to be thought of.’ And ‘Yes, you have unfolded what I had implied,’ or something like that. It would not strike the poet, I hope, that there was a discrepancy between my description of the work and the poet’s own conception of it. I wouldn’t be happy if a poet read what I had written and said, ‘What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.’�

from Humanities Magazine: Helen Vendler: The Poem Unfolded

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It was a memory that stayed with him [Seamus Heaney]: "Reading 'Hallaig' on that occasion, in the poet's [Sorley MacLean's] own English, and hearing it in the deep lamenting register of the Gaelic, extended and confirmed my sense of him as a major figure. This was the song of a man who had come through, a poem with all the lucidity and arbitrariness of a vision . . . Hallaig is a key poem because it is about haunting and loss and this mood is a persistent one all through the world, as is the theme of love and wounding: which arrests the fluent dreamscape at the end of the poem."

from The Herald: Time steps back to Hallaig Wood

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Philosopher-poets have awfully complicated our lives by redefining individual responsibility. The balloon of intimate individual existence inflated with personal dreams and aspirations has been pricked by an enhanced collective awareness. Individual redemption today is only possible through collective human struggle to redeem itself from pain and degradation inflicted by tyrants. Where must everyone stand in this landscape is a matter that each must judge for himself individually. What must a poet or a painter address is a question to which each writer and artist must find his own answer.

from Daily Times: The Way It Was: A substitute for the real thing

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