Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show.
Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
The thing that got me closest to doing Kermit was remembering what Jim did when he was doing Kermit. When he would do Kermit, there were certain faces that he made. There was a certain way he stood, a certain kind of body language that he had.
I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.
I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Jim, as just a spoken poet, was not that good. He needed the music behind him. He felt a security and a sense of abandon when the music existed around him.