Dan Schneider Quotes

I've said this before: a lot of people think they're artists because they feel things deeply. You know, we're in a culture now and a time where people think they talk about their truth...'If I feel something so deeply, it must be true!' You know, 'I know that I was raped by a big-footed six and had to give up the...the big-foot baby two aliens to go back to Zontar!', you know? People believe this sh*t! I talked about this crazy woman who I knew years ago who thinks she had a near-death experience and now could control electricity and talk to God and angels and stuff..and every poster she puts up that I see gets more elaborate and insane! You know...pretty soon, she's gonna be, you know, f***ing, who knows...ISIS! [...] it's like, these are the kinds of people...they're not only in the arts, they're everywhere, and years ago, when [politicians] would talk about the 'wisdom of the masses', the common people...the Internet has proved that's utterly ridiculous.

I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through. And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can. And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art!

Do you feel rejected and ridiculed? Link those emotions to Jesus who was ridiculed by the religious leaders as He hung on the cross. By this simple technique, you begin to form the habit of separating the emotion from the memory. This not only removes the enemy’s weapon against you but also teaches you the value of mental prayer in gaining custody of your thoughts—an essential element of spiritual warfare.

To wit, if a person dies in a state of mortal sin, that person will be the slave, for eternity, of the demon who enticed him to mortal sin. The torment of enslavement, both experienced now and for eternity, is the goal of the demon. What keeps most people enslaved is fear. Because of fear, the story continues, not a single soldier from the Israelite army accepted the Philistine’s challenge. Even King Saul, who himself “stood head and shoulders above the people” (1 Sm 9:2), was afraid to meet Goliath in battle. In fact, Scripture tells us that King Saul himself “was tormented by an evil spirit” due to his own disobedience to God’s commands and pride

angels go where they are asked, and demons go where they are not resisted.

A sacrificial theology means that you must begin to see yourself as an “associate” of Christ in the distribution of the graces of redemption. You must learn to echo the words of Christ who said, “This is my body which I give up for you.” That is, develop a Eucharistic spirituality that offers your body (all of your physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological affliction) for Him and for others.

qu’elle buvait dans un mazagran bleu pétrole. Avant même de s’habiller, elle brancha son iPad dont la batterie s’était complètement déchargée durant la nuit. La marque à la pomme était une vraie religion pour elle et

For Bly is certainly not alone in this trait of withering away his talent with the years. Most poets have a prime of 35-50 years old. It takes a couple decades or so to ramp up your talent, shed your imitations, & gain the maturity to formulate a POV that is unique & not generic. After 50 youthful desire wanes, success weakens what age does not, & the mind loses its elasticity a bit, in most. Rare is the poet that improves with age (usually it’s stagnation, then regression)- among big-name English language poets only Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, & Robert Hayden stand in contrast. Bly’s company includes Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, Quincey Troupe, Carolyn Forche, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Gary Snyder, & dozens of recognizable names (at least among those who had some talent to begin with). Yet, that still does not absolve the individual, nor his/her work. For this Bly stands accused, tried, convicted, & sentenced to a slow fade away from any lasting import in American poetry. (...) But it highlights the frequency with which Bly falls into didacticism- a trait he always displays with audiences- reading & rereading the most inconsequential images, lines, stanzas, & poems as if of cosmic import. It’s also the dead giveaway of a man unsure of himself, his talent, & in need of constant reinforcement. But then he’s always played the “insecure liberal”, wasting time & energy in politics that should go to art, who needs to show his/her innate goodness, go to a [3rd World country/rehab center/orphanage/social activist group] to see how the other ½ lives, translate 5th rate poetasters into English, & leach bad poems from the transformative period so crucial to their growth as a poet/person.

W.S. Merwin is about as prototypical a Dead White Male as 1 can get. Yes, he’s male. Yes, he’s white. Yes, he’s been creatively dead for the last 25-30 years. But it goes even beyond that. He once had great potential. His 1st 4 books, released in the 1960s, seemed to show him as an American Ted Hughes, with talent. He would write dense, brief (page-length), poems that harkened back to the didactic verse abundant in the Bible, Koran, & other religious books of mystery. He even produced a couple of pretty good books of proems, which had the potential to chart a distinctly American type of the form- beyond the grim Deutscher sort, & deeper than the pallid American forms introduced by Robert Bly, & his acolytes. Then, in the early 1970s, it all stopped. WSM seemingly took a vow against actually writing anything of interest. His meticulous earlier craftsmanship gave way to a formless sort of masturbatory nothingness, exemplified by his desire to write almost nothing but these cliché-ridden, unrevised pieces of tripe...

Robert Duncan could have been a great poet. He sort of balanced between experimentalism and classicism. The problem is he never really made up his mind, one way or the other. He should have gone more into the classical vein and expanded it from within, but a lot of times his poetry descends into prose koans interspersed with a line or two of poetic sounding verse, such as his ‘poems’ on The Structure Of Rime, which don’t deal with the structure of rime.

In this book of 378 poems, I state that 54 of Bruce’s poems (46 arios and 8 non-arios) are first look and easily gleaned great poems. I have applied a very strict and fine measure of this, and, if anything I have undercounted his great verse, just to be on the safe side. I have done the same with my corpus. I wrote poetry from 1984 to 2005. My first 9 years were my juvenilia, as I wrote intensely and prolifically for 7 of those years, then cut down, as I basically poetically incubated for 2 years. I wrote my first great poem in 1993, and when 2005 saw me move on to prose fiction, and later, in 2017, plays, I had tallied 1021 great poems, but I did not count my several hundred great haikus nor many of the near-great and excellent poems I graded myself as having- poems many others have raved of. So, in actuality, if I use their lesser critical guidelines, I probably have between 1200 and 1500 great poems written in that 12 year window. But I am the outlier’s outlier in all art.

Paul McCartney’s solo career, Willie Mays’ last season with the New York Mets, Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial, John Ashbery’s Flowchart, Georgia O’Keeffe’s last 10 years of paintings, T.S. Eliot’s plays, & John Glenn’s last flight as an astronaut. The Beatles’ Long and Winding Road, Jim Brown’s last season, Keats’ Odes, Mozart’s concertos, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Wilfred Owen’s lyrics, & Marie Curie in her laboratory. The former set we recall- if at all- because all of the folk were past their prime- way past. Almost embarrassing were their quests &/or achievements. The latter we recall- & will most likely always do so with fondness & fervor- because they left their respective quests at the height of their powers. It’s how we all hope to be recalled. When we think of an afterlife we always envision ourselves at the prime of our life. Who would want to inhabit a realm filled with yipping old yentas & crusty altacockers? It’s one of the oldest stereotypes there is about the creationary impulse: The fires of youth. One of the great sources of woe for a lot of artists is that just as they get enough time & experience under their belts to gain technical skill in their field, the impulse to do so wanes. There seems to be a brief nexus where the 2- skill & desire- meet & are sustaining. Too young & a lot of crap- with potential- is produced. Too old & little work is made- & what is is skilled but dull, repetitive, & uninteresting. Thus most artists, &/or scientists, have similar careers which graphed would form a nice slowly rising & falling horizontal arc whose rounded apex is between the years 35 & 50. But is it necessarily so? There are examples of such who defy the conventional wisdom in poetry. The 2 best examples in the English language are Wallace Stevens & William Butler Yeats- in fact their poetry probably kept improving with age. But for every Stevens & Yeats there’s the last 20 years of Whitman’s bloated poetry & terrible prose, Hardy’s verse, Pound’s Cantos, Ginsberg’s last 30 years, Ashbery, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, Quincy Troupe, & on & on.

Paul: That depresses you? Danny: Why wouldn’t it? I mean, if this kid is trying, but failing completely…. I mean, art is hard and he doesn’t have it, and doesn’t even seem to be trying. Paul: I try. Danny: I know, but there are no guarantees that you nor Zin will become great. I mean, you both are technically solid, at times, but you both need to wean off of my poetry. You need to differentiate into Paul and Zin. I mean, but even that is no guarantee. I mean. Look at all the people on Omniversica’s e-list. I mean, I’ve talked about it, and how real life intrudes and kills off artistic impulse. You told me Ben might not have continued writing had he not met you. Who knows what Jess would have done without me? Who knows if you’ll be writing in a decade? I mean, suppose you can only be good and competent. Would that satisfy? I mean, on the e-list there are people who can be great in one poem and then for another 200 poems write shit. There’s someone who wrote a great book length poem and now writes nothing. Another guy has great talent, took classes to get degrees in religion and now does little in art, because he runs an online marketing thing. Then there are those with talent who just stop and study shit. I told you about my pal who gave up art to become a sex researcher. Then there’s that girl who spent over seventy thousand bucks at an online university where a bad writer ‘teaches’ how to be a bad writer. I told you of that video Jess showed of a bad writer girl teaching others to be generic hacks. Others fuck up their lives via pregnancy. Others just grow up and forget art. You saw the work of the one guy who spent three years on a terrible book. Then he told me he was gonna craft Youtube videos. Now, he says he’s into trading cryptocurrency. And when we met he was a poet. Now he’s into Bitcoin. It’s so depressing. I think of the old folks from the Uptown Poetry Group- some are dead, others probably homeless or in mental institutions, and I told you about that guy who harassed all the women at the UPG? And he’s probably still thriving in business. And then my ex, Stacy Stafford, who’s now a New Age Christian scam artist. Jess rails about people who come to us only for help and do nothing to help us. I mean, think of a great poet like James Emanuel, and how I tried to help him, and now his stuff is almost forgotten, and the rights to his work are held by a little shit press that doesn’t even put out his work! And what about my old friend George Dickerson, the actor and poet? I did a few interviews about his excellent screenplay on his time as a diplomat in Lebanon and no one cares- even his son, a famed filmmaker in Finland- even that son refuses to do his father’s script. I mean, he has the name, the means, and the clout to get it made, and STILL George’s art is left to wither. And these people I contact for interviews? Most of them don’t even read a simple email! They ask if a Danny Wagner Video Interview is just audio or not? I mean, READ! People are so lazy, these days, it’s unreal. One cannot even read a lousy email! I mean- Paul: Yeah, it’s a shame. Danny: I’m not a magician. I can only guarantee that Jess and I will be great writers because only we are NOW and currently great. Others? Who knows? Some forget literature to do pop genres like sci fi or romance- maybe switch things up by writing about goblins. Others just quit altogether. I can’t make you nor Ben great. YOU have to do that, and I recall reading that excerpt you sent Jess of his book, where he wants money and to be a great artist, too, but by doing so parttime. That is not a good long term sign, but it is what it is. I can’t change people. I can’t change you. I can’t change Ben. I can’t change this Landon kid. I can’t even change Jess! I’m mortal.

Let me posit 2 other divisions. The 1st is somewhat nebulous & entails some generalizations. I state that Shakespeare- despite claims for his universality- was a very limited thinker- at least thematically; although similar themes would often be twisted anew with metaphor & image. But compared to the aforementioned other sonneteers Shakespeare demonstrates a near tunnel vision in range of themes (let’s put aside the question of his own Shakespearean sonnet form). Even worse, he seemed to be obsessed with running said themes into the ground. In the sonnets there are only a handful of broad themes- with only occasional overlap. They are: beauty, sleep/dreams, love/friendship, despair/ parting, art/the Muse, &, of course, death. The riposte: But isn’t all Art about these things? Well, yes & no. Yes, in a broad sense, but no in the sense that Modern Poetry’s superiority to Classical or non-Modern [a term I prefer to pre-Modern because any number of poets today still write this type of poetry & it seems silly to label these contemporaries pre-anything!] poetry is its very multi-layered approach to these themes & relegating them to sub-themes at service to portraits of people, events, & moments. This is all dramatic technique centuries ahead of Shakespeare & while his best sonnets survive this his worst are telltale in their failure’s being tied to their time.

A final point on this poem, & RH as a poet. 1 of the great conflation made in criticism of poetry is the terms great & important. They are 2 different things. There are great poets who are not particularly important. In this camp would be an Edgar Allan Poe, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, & Countee Cullen, among some others. These are poets for whom there is no doubt that great poetry sprang from. BUT, their work did not have a profound effect on the advancement of the art form of poetry. They were either technically superb craftsmen who were the best at their craft but wrote on things, & in ways, similar to others. They were simply better. Here would be Poe, Kipling, & Cullen. Or they were inventive & unique, but while inspiring devotees, never gave rise to poetic heirs. Here is Dickinson. Or they were hit & miss poets who often set back the art. Here are Neruda- whose great personal, lyric, & love poems in a traditional vein were counterbalanced by his atrociously puerile political & ‘experimental’ poems. Also in this category- despite his High Modernist credentials, is Ezra Pound. Most of his great poems are in ancient forms, in mock fashion. An envelope-pusher he was not- although he spurred TSE to greater heights than he was capable of by himself. Then there is a Jeffers- a poet who was superb; yet mystifyingly left little impact- most likely due to his reclusive personae & political prophesying. Yet all these poets touched the ineffable at least a few times in their careers. A 2nd camp are those poets who are important but not really great poets. Their poems had significant impact on the art, but the poets’ work, overall, rarely touched greatness. In this camp would reside a T.S. Eliot- whose whole career consists of 5 or 6 near-great to great poems & a passel of shit, William Carlos Williams- whose prosaic approach to poetry overshadowed the fact that he only had 10 or 12 good 10 line or less poems in his arsenal, Arthur Rimbaud- whose impact was more on the ‘cult of the poet’ than on the art form, Anna Akhmatova- whose import was more as ‘functional state treasure’ than persuasive writer, Allen Ginsberg- who has 12 or so great poems that showed new boundaries & subject matter could work in poetry, but also wrote a passel of utter doggerel, & Derek Walcott- who, despite early promise, has a body of banal poetry, yet opened the way for several generations of non-European poets’ poetry to find a Western audience. None of these poets will stand too tall in the coming centuries for their work, but- their impact on varied aspects of the art is undeniable. This is the difference between the 2. Greatness is about how much the art succeeds & stands alone, Import is on the non-artistic aspects of the work & poet. Of course, a 3rd category exists for those poets that were great & important. Whose excellence & import is undeniable. In this camp would reside John Donne- the 1st English language poet with a Modern mindset, if not vocabulary, Walt Whitman- whose work revolutionized subject matter, & led to the war against formalism, Charles Baudelaire- who did the same as Whitman in French, Stephane Mallarmé- whose fragmenting of form led directly to Eliot, but whose work has held up far better despite being older, Hart Crane- who created lyric epopee, & whose verse reached in new directions in new ways- cracking the ekstasis of poetry open & truly inventing the REAL Language poetry of the 20th Century, Marina Tsvetaeva & Sylvia Plath- the 2 women who became iconic Feminist heroines with legions of acolytes worldwide, yet wove together brilliant poetry despite mental illnesses, & Wallace Stevens- whose great poetry has given heart to legions of poetry lovers who appreciate games played with beauty & philosophy.