It Was One Of The Great Mass

Poetry Is A Man Arguing With Himself; Rhetoric Is A Man Arguing With Others.

Such Tenderness, Those Afternoons And Evenings, Saying Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry.

In California In The Early Spring, There Are Pale Yellow Mornings, When The Mist Burns Slowly Into Day, The Air Stings Like Autumn, Clarifies Like Pain - Well, I Have Dreamed This Coast Myself.

Poetry Had In The Hands Of Various People Become A Place For Inconvenient Knowledge Insofar As It Was A Place For Knowledge At All. But It Was A Place Where You Could Talk About Other Kinds Of Experience Than The Official Version.

I Think That Were I In The Middle Of An Obsession To Write About, Say, Sudden Oak Death In California Or My Grandchildren Or Time And Memory And How They Look When You Get To Be In Your Sixties, And I Thought, "well, Yes But People Are Dying Every Day In Baghdad," I Wouldn't Feel Guilty About Not Writing About Baghdad If I Didn't Have Any Good Ideas About How To Write About It.