All I Wanted Was To Be A

To Write Poetry Is To Be Very Alone, But You Always Have The Company Of Your Influences. But You Also Have The Company Of The Form Itself, Which Has A Kind Of Consciousness. I Mean, The Sonnet Will Simply Tell You, That's Too Many Syllables Or That's Too Many Lines Or That's The Wrong Place. So, Instead Of Being Alone, You're In Dialogue With The Form.

When I'm Constructing A Poem, I'm Trying To Write One Good Line After Another. One Solid Line After Another. You Know A Lot Of The Lines - Some Hold Up Better As Lines Than Others. But I'm Not Thinking Of Just Writing A Paragraph And Then Chopping It Up.

You Know How Sometimes You Just Have A Memory Of Looking Up And Seeing A Face Looking Over Your Crib And Then Remember Nothing Until Tenth Grade? - I Have One Of These Early Memories Where I'm In The Back Of My Parents' Car, A Place I Loved To Spend A Lot Of Time As An Only Child, Not Having To Fight With Venomous Siblings Over The Only Toy.

I Could Feel The Day Offering Itself To Me, And I Wanted Nothing More Than To Be In The Moment-but Which Moment? Not That One, Or That One, Or That One.

It's Time To Float On The Waters Of The Night. Time To Wrap My Arms Around This Book And Press It To My Chest, Life Preserver In A Seat Of Unremarkable Men And Women Anonymous Faces On The Street, A Hundred Thousand Unalphabitized Things A Million Forgotten Hours.