It's Time To Float On The Waters

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.

By Clarity I Don't Mean That We're Always In Kind Of A Simple Area Where Everything Is Clear And Comforting And Understood. Clarity Is Certainly A Way Toward Disorientation Because If You Don't Start Out - If The Reader Isn't Grounded, If The Reader Is Disoriented In The Beginning Of The Poem, Then The Reader Can't Be Led Astray Or Disoriented Later.

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.

I Was A Pretty Happy Kid, I Had To Fake It. I Had To Get Into This Miserable Character Before I Wrote Poems.

I Think A Good Poem Should Have Some Inscrutable Part. You Can't Quite Explain It. The Poem Can Only Explain Itself To A Certain Limit And At That Point You Enter Into A Little Bit Of Mystery. That For Me Is The Perfect Poem: To Begin In Clarity And To End In Mystery.