JAMES BROUGHTON

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

Acclaim is a distraction.

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.