Everything I Can't See / Is At

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.

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.

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.

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

A Good Many Of My Poems Over The Years Have Alluded To Or Taken On The Political. Stevens Has A Line In One Of His Essays: "reality Exerts Pressure On The Imagination." Inevitably What Is Omnipresent In The Culture Exerts Its Pressure On Our Imaginations To Respond To It, Even If Indirectly. But In This Case The Backdrop Of 9/11, Coincident With The Breakup Of A Marriage, The Finding Of New Love, Some Kind Of Personal Cataclysm... All Of Those Were Forces Informing The Poems In Some Way.