I See Woefully Obscure Poetry As Simply

I Stared Up At The Ebbing Quarter Moon And The Stars Scattered Like A Handful Of Salt Across The Faraway Sky.

A Sentence Starts Out Like A Lone Traveler Heading Into A Blizzard At Midnight, Tilting Into The Wind, One Arm Shielding His Face, The Tails Of His Thin Coat Flapping Behind Him.

Some Difficulty Is Warranted And Other Difficulty I Think Is Gratuitous. And I Think I Can Tell The Difference. There Are Certainly Very Difficult Poets That I Really Enjoy Reading.

A Trouble With Poetry Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, The Sense You Get In A Poem That The Poet Takes For Granted An Interest On The Reader's Part In The Poet's Autobiographical Life, In The Poet's Memories, Problems, Difficulties And Even Minor Perceptions. I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

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.