For as long as I’ve known myself, social issues have been more important to me than anything else. In Recife the shantytowns were my first truth. Long before I felt “art,” I felt the profound beauty of struggle.
For as long as I’ve known myself, social issues have been more important to me than anything else. In Recife the shantytowns were my first truth. Long before I felt “art,” I felt the profound beauty of struggle.
“I imagine that before I had read any modern poetry I had the same inhibition about reading poetry that most people have all the time. They say, ‘I don’t know how to appreciate this, it’s something that I don’t know anything about.’ There is the feeling that you have to take some kind of course before you can understand a poem which I think prevents people from reading poetry. They think that you cannot simply open a book of poems, start reading and instantly enjoy it. I discovered later on that wasn’t true.”
John Ashbery