I Was A Pretty Happy Kid, I

Poetry Is My Cheap Means Of Transportation, By The End Of The Poem The Reader Should Be In A Different Place From Where He Started. I Would Like Him To Be Slightly Disoriented At The End, Like I Drove Him Outside Of Town At Night And Dropped Him Off In A Cornfield.

Bugs Bunny Is My Muse.

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.

I See All Of Us Reading Ourselves Away From Ourselves, Straining In Circles Of Light To Find More Light Until The Line Of Words Becomes A Trail Of Crumbs That We Follow Across A Page Of Fresh Snow.

As Soon As I Start To Write I'm Very Aware, I'm Trying To Be Aware That A Reader Just Might Well Pick Up This Poem, A Stranger. So When I'm Writing - And I Think That This Is Important For All Writers - I'm Trying To Be A Writer And A Reader Back And Forth. I Write Two Lines Or Three Lines. I Will Immediately Stop And Turn Into A Reader Instead Of A Writer, And I'll Read Those Lines As If I Had Never Seen Them Before And As If I Had Never Written Them.