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Remember that when you say I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange, you have denied America with that word.

Stephen Vincent Benet

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Stephen Vincent Benet
Age: 44 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 22
Died: 1943
Died: March 13
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
Stephen Vincent Benet
Like
Stranger
Speech
Strange
Word
Face
Faces
Exile
Remember
Denied
America
Immigration

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One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
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Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years - a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds.
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Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
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I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
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Broad-streeted Richmond . . . The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.
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Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.
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Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell's broke loose in Georgia.
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When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from A - particularly sections 22 and 23. It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.
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Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.
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Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
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Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls, Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars - They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble, Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy, That something new is coming to the world, The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming, And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.
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The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.
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Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.
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Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my bufdfalo have found me.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.
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We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
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When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
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American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.
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Basically when I'm walking I'm not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.
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