My Suspicion Is That Once You Have

The Professionalization Of Poetry, Or The Balkanization, Has Come Out Of The Fact That When You Apply To Most Creative Writing Programs, You Have To Choose Your Genre.

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.

Poetry, When It Takes Sides, When It Proposes Solutions, Isn't Any Smarter Than Anybody Else.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

The First Book That Really Knocked Me Out Was The 'brothers Karamazov.' I Read It When I Was A Senior In High School.