“I was concerned with not only the artist’s role in calamity, but the question of how artists should situate themselves in an oracular sense, towards the potential of forestalling future calamities and creating a more just society.”
“People ask, ‘Is it hard to be expected to be funny all the time?’ and the answer is that it’s hard to be expected to be serious all the time.”
“I miss the sanity and the kind of routineness of the world, the world in which the news is just something that happens faraway and is very predictable. The news has been way too present.”
“We are not in debt because we live beyond our means. We are indebted because we are denied the means to live.”
“I always bridle a little against it because [the anthropocene] means “the age of man” or “the age of humans” and there’s sort of this flattening in that terminology that sort of ascribes the marks that we’ve left on this planet to humanness, as opposed to a certain way of being human that is not the way most people have been humans throughout history. In fact, it’s not the way most people are humans even now. It’s a particular kind of dominance-based, extractive-based capitalist way of being th...
“How is it that a corporation has taken over the prosecutorial power of our government to go after the lawyer who held it accountable for the worst environmental disaster in world history? We need to wake up to this.”
“An ideal for me, as an artist, is to sort of be able to identify with points of view without espousing them myself.”
“I’m in a negotiation against my grief a lot of the time...and sometimes the grief will back off and other times it will say, “Oh no, we’re doing this right now” and I’ve learned [to] pull the car over and now you just have to let it have its way with you.”
“I don't know what the plants say, because we have not yet managed to decode the reverse dialogue, but I know that each of them, when they have been there attending that concert, will have undergone a change in their vital strategy in some way, by being at that concert.” “No sé lo que dicen las plantas, porque todavía el diálogo inverso no lo hemos conseguido decodificar, pero sé que cada una de ellas, cuando han estado allí asistiendo a ese concierto, habrá sufrido un cambio en su estrategia vi...
“We’re all called in our human being-ness to embody what a warrior embodies, and that’s someone who’s awake and is listening and is moving through the world listening.”
“I think embarrassment is human. We, as Americans, need to come to terms with the fact that we’re always going to have something to be embarrassed for. We have leaders who do embarrass us, even when we like them.”
“Don’t you ever forget that love made you. That’s a really important fact for me as a poet of my time in this world today.”
“The notion that we are an indispensable nation, which has been around for decades, or that we have the right to triumphalism and the end of civilization with the United States winning the civilization game, I think should be jettisoned right now, but they also should have been jettisoned years ago. A great nation, in my mind, doesn’t need to boast. A great nation needs to get its act together at home for its own people.”
“Western language doesn’t give us that space in between. Either you hope and you’re optimistic or you’re pessimistic. There’s a clear either white or black, there’s no gray in between.”
“It’s a big question, the “where are we” with politics, with cultural discourse, with the media, all of it, but through it all, I do feel optimistic somewhat. And we could try to parse it down--where does the optimism come from? As a publisher, you have to be an optimist.”
”Who is at the center of your vision? ‘Cause if the poor and the sick and the unemployed and those facing eviction are not at the center of your vision, you will misuse your position because nothing is guiding you.”
“A lot of times we want every line to be its own character, and you can do that. I like some of that writing, but is it in the service of the paragraph? And is the paragraph in service of the page? And is that page in service of the book? And the larger question is that book in the service of a liberatory vision?”
“Contending with this immeasurable grief is what made me a writer.”
“Art is made from life. And, so, how do we encourage a kind of life that has meaning and purpose on a very small level, in our personal worlds and in the worlds of the people we love?”
“You realize that we’re so spoiled, we just want to do whatever we want to do at any time. We’re just so used to having our needs met whenever we want, and this is a time of just great discipline.”
“When I’m walking, I’m trying to keep my eyes open and my ears open and my mind open. To be open, and observant. To look for the poem in my walk. I am walking and looking for the poem to meet me.”
“We’re in a severely divided country and my question I’m carrying is, 'How can I be a good citizen in a divided country?'”.
“There are deeper relationships being formed and a deeper understanding of our love for each other and also our lives.”
“Hurricanes, storms destroy us and we forget about them instantly and we rebuild. We just have very little capacity to alter our ways. My fear is that when the pandemic disappears...we will act as if it never happened.”
“I think what people should understand about whistleblowers is that they’re Americans who love and care for their country just like anyone else, and have chosen to take a very risky step to say no and to stand up against the powers that be.“
“Monolingualism is a carbon monoxide of cultures and multilingualism is the oxygen of cultures [...] In an equal give and take, [languages] enrich each other. Languages have borrowed words from other languages, quite happily.”
“During this pandemic I think we have the opportunity to see this as a transformative time, as well as a deploy harrowing time, but that the seeds of renewal are beneath our feet.”
“There seems to be some slippage to the essential service, to the inessential service, to the expendable industry and from there to the expendable human being, and no human being is expendable. Not one.”
“The meaning of life, for me, and it never changed, is you find out who you are. Your duty is to find out who you are, what you are, and do the very best you can with that, and share what you do with other people. That’s what I’ve done my whole life.”
“My worry is not that we are socially distant, which we are, which we have been even before quarantine. My worry is that we are spiritually distant, and unless we leave this time with a more serious understanding of our spiritual and ancestral resources, then it’s going to be very hard for anyone to believe that we can access trans-generational ecstasy.”
