A True Inner World Is Often Revealed

There's A Certain Pleasure In Violating The Strictures Of Your Education. The Trick Is, If You're Going To Explore Ideas In A Poem, To Be Suspicious Of Ideas And Suspicious Of Your Own Mind At The Same Time. It's Often A Matter Of Orchestration And Pacing. Of Shaping Some Kind Of Dialectic Flow.

I Wrote Poetry For Seven Or Eight Years, Maybe Longer, Before I Could Say I Was A Poet. If People Asked, I'd Say I Wrote Poetry; I Wouldn't Go Further. I Was In My Mid- To Late-thirties Before I Felt That I Was A Poet, Which I Think Meant That I Had Begun To Embody My Poems In Some Way. I Wasn't Just A Writer Of Them. Hard To Say What, As A Poet, My Place In The World Is. Some Place Probably Between Recognition And Neglect.

Connubial Because With Alarming Accuracy She’d Been Identifying Patterns I Was Unaware Of—this Tic, That Tendency, Like The Way I've Mastered The Language Of Intimacy In Order To Conceal How I Felt— I Knew I Was In Danger Of Being Terribly Understood.

Better To Be Furious At One Thing, Become Radiant With Purpose. Better To Love Links And Rhythms Than All-embracing Answers.

I Don't Let A Poem Go Into The World Unless I Feel That I've Transformed The Experience In Some Way. Even Poems I've Written In The Past That Appear Very Personal Often Are Fictions Of The Personal, Which Nevertheless Reveal Concerns Of Mine. I've Always Thought Of My First-person Speaker As An Amalgam Of Selves, Maybe Of Other People's Experiences As Well.