They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

he threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.