You sullen pig of a manyou force me into the mudwith your stinking ash-cart!

Everyone in this life is defeated. But a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. . . . This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

I considered it was best not to force him.

I will teach you my townspeoplehow to perform a funeralfor you have it over a troopof artists--unless one should scour the world--you have the ground sense necessary.

The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.