One Of These Days I'm-a Make Me

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.

As Soon As I Start To Write I'm Very Aware, I'm Trying To Be Aware That A Reader Just Might Well Pick Up This Poem, A Stranger. So When I'm Writing - And I Think That This Is Important For All Writers - I'm Trying To Be A Writer And A Reader Back And Forth. I Write Two Lines Or Three Lines. I Will Immediately Stop And Turn Into A Reader Instead Of A Writer, And I'll Read Those Lines As If I Had Never Seen Them Before And As If I Had Never Written Them.

Robert Frost Really Started This Whole Thing Rolling. He Was, I Believe, The First Poet Who Started Going To Colleges. Before That, Poets Didn't Give Public Readings Very Often, Certainly Not - There Was No Circuit Of Schools.

The Pen Is An Instrument Of Discovery Rather Than Just A Recording Implement. If You Write A Letter Of Resignation Or Something With An Agenda, You're Simply Using A Pen To Record What You Have Thought Out.

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.