“But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - n...” — Mark Strand Quote

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

It's very hard to write humor.

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

There's nothing less sexy than a girl falling over on stage. I have fallen once, but it had nothing to do with my shoes. I'm legally blind, so I fell over a monitor because the stage was black, and I had no depth perception. Mortifying.

When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.

I lived in New York until I was eleven years old, when my mother left my two older sisters and my father. My mother is 90 percent blind and deaf. She left and moved all the way to California. So I left my two older sisters and my father behind at the age of eleven and moved cross-country to take care of her.