No One Here Likes A Wet Dog.

When I'm Constructing A Poem, I'm Trying To Write One Good Line After Another. One Solid Line After Another. You Know A Lot Of The Lines - Some Hold Up Better As Lines Than Others. But I'm Not Thinking Of Just Writing A Paragraph And Then Chopping It Up.

I'm A Line-maker. I Think That's What Makes Poets Different From Prose-writers. That's The Main Way. We Think, Not Just In Sentences The Way Prose Writers Do But Also In Lines. So We're Doing These Two Things At The Same Time.

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.

Listeners Are Kind Of Ambushed... If A Poem Just Happens To Be Said When They're Listening To The Radio. The Listener Doesn't Have Time To Deploy What I Call Their 'poetry Deflector Shields' That Were Installed In High School - There's Little Time To Resist The Poem.

I Think More Influential Than Emily Dickinson Or Coleridge Or Wordsworth On My Imagination Were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies And Looney Tunes Cartoons.