All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
Take the time to write. You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.
August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Golf is a worrier’s game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.
I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.