Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.
— James Broughton
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
Amazement awaits us at every corner.
True delicacy is not a fragile thing.
Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.
Adversity is a stimulus.
I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
The American public does not know poets exist.
Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.
I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.
If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.
I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.
My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.
Acclaim is a distraction.
I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
The only limits are, as always, those of vision.
Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.
If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.
I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.
Consciousness is the glory of creation.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
