One Does Not Become A Guru By

Saigon Was An Addicted City, And We Were The Drug: The Corruption Of Children, The Mutilation Of Young Men, The Prostitution Of Women, The Humiliation Of The Old, The Division Of The Family, The Division Of The Country-it Had All Been Done In Our Name. . . . The French City . . . Had Represented The Opium Stage Of The Addiction. With The Americans Had Begun The Heroin Phase.

The Voice Is Raised, And That Is Where Poetry Begins. And Even Today, In The Prolonged Aftermath Of Modernism, In Places Where "open Form" Or Free Verse Is The Orthodoxy, You Will Find A Memory Of That Raising Of The Voice In The Term "heightened Speech".

The Writing Of A Poem Is Like A Child Throwing Stones Into A Mineshaft. You Compose First, Then You Listen For The Reverberation.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.

"love" Is So Short Of Perfect Rhymes That Convention Allows Half-rhymes Like "move". The Alternative Is A Plague Of Doves, Or A Kind Of Poem In Which The Poet Addresses His Adored Both As "love" And As "guv" - A Perfectly Decent Solution Once, But Only Once, In A While.