Raised in a working-class, immigrant family, I didn't have access to poetry. I want to write poetry that my mother can read, or poetry that I would have loved as a little boy. I think of myself as a poet of the people. I argue against the idea that if a poem is accessible, it's not complex. Accessible is not synonymous with simple.
Richard BlancoRelated topics
access boy complex family idea immigrant mother people poem poet poetry read simple think writeRelated quotes
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.
Per Petterson
I've always loved the power of stories to transport me to another world, to imagine extraordinary possibilities, to experience things I may not have access to in my regular life - like being a superhero! Also, I would always put on shows for my family and the neighbors; I guess I was an actor before I even knew it.
Kandyse McClure
Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved. [...] I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.
Fernando Pessoa
