“ To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night. ”
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
~ Grace Paley
I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my ownmemorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, calledrote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,a great human gift disowned.
We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
