The Pen Is An Instrument Of Discovery

It's Time To Float On The Waters Of The Night. Time To Wrap My Arms Around This Book And Press It To My Chest, Life Preserver In A Seat Of Unremarkable Men And Women Anonymous Faces On The Street, A Hundred Thousand Unalphabitized Things A Million Forgotten Hours.

You Come By Your Style By Learning What To Leave Out. At First You Tend To Overwrite—embellishment Instead Of Insight. You Either Continue To Write Puerile Bilge, Or You Change. In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.

Introduction To Poetry I Ask Them To Take A Poem And Hold It Up To The Light Like A Color Slide Or Press An Ear Against Its Hive. I Say Drop A Mouse Into A Poem And Watch Him Probe His Way Out, Or Walk Inside The Poem's Room And Feel The Walls For A Light Switch. I Want Them To Waterski Across The Surface Of A Poem Waving At The Author's Name On The Shore. But All They Want To Do Is Tie The Poem To A Chair With Rope And Torture A Confession Out Of It. They Begin Beating It With A Hose To Find Out What It Really Means.

You Know How Sometimes You Just Have A Memory Of Looking Up And Seeing A Face Looking Over Your Crib And Then Remember Nothing Until Tenth Grade? - I Have One Of These Early Memories Where I'm In The Back Of My Parents' Car, A Place I Loved To Spend A Lot Of Time As An Only Child, Not Having To Fight With Venomous Siblings Over The Only Toy.

Now I Would Say At Any Given Moment In American Life, There Are Probably 45 Poets In Airplanes Vectoring Across The Country Heading Towards...i Don't Know If Anyone's Reading It, But Poets Are Still Flying Around The Country Going From Lectern To Lectern.that Circuitry Has Become Very Well-established.