All I Wanted Was To Be A

I'm Speaking To Someone I'm Trying To Get To Fall In Love With Me. I'm Trying To Speak Intimately To One Person. That Should Be Clear. I'm Not Speaking To An Audience. I'm Not Writing For The Podium. I'm Just Writing, Trying To Write In A Fairly Quiet Tone To One Other Reader Who Is By Herself, Or Himself, And I'm Trying To Interrupt Some Silence In Their Life, Which Is Utterance.

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 See Woefully Obscure Poetry As Simply A Kind Of Verbal Rudeness.

I Think What Gets A Poem Going Is An Initiating Line. Sometimes A First Line Will Occur, And It Goes Nowhere; But Other Times - And This, I Think, Is A Sense You Develop - I Can Tell That The Line Wants To Continue. If It Does, I Can Feel A Sense Of Momentum - The Poem Finds A Reason For Continuing.

The Literary World Is So Full Of Pretension, And There's Such An Enormous Gap Between How Seriously Poets Take Themselves And How Widely They're Ignored By Everybody Else.