We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing economics politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.
It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.
Justice sir is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
But poetry is a way of language it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
Because people are very interested in my poetry in what I say.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.
For whatever reason people including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading do not read poetry.
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.
I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
I've always written all my life and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to what they were doing why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Too often in the past U.S. leaders have forced Israel to pay the price for American strategic interests in the Middle East - through concessions in the peace process as well as passivity in the face of Iraqi attacks.
You've got to reach a hand of friendship across the aisle and across philosophies in this country.