The Strange Machinery By Which A Reputation

You Know What I Do? I Listen To Other People, Stumbling About With Their Half Thoughts And Half Sentences And Their Clumsy Feelings That They Can't Express, And It Hurts Me. So I Go Home And Burnish It And Polish It And Weld It To A Rhythmic Frame, Make The Dull Colors Gleam, Mute The Garish Artificiality To Pastels, So It Doesn't Hurt Any More: That's My Poem. I Know What They Want To Say, And I Say It For Them.

Like Contemporary Poetry, Philosophy Is One Of Those Things, Especially At The Beginning Stages, Most People Would Rather Do Than Study - Which Is Why Most Of What Gets Done Is So Impoverished.

There Is No Articulate Resonance. The Common Problem, I Suppose, Is To Have More To Say Than Vocabulary And Syntax Can Bear. That Is Why I Am Hunting In These Desiccated Streets. The Smoke Hides The Sky's Variety, Stains Consciousness, Covers The Holocaust With Something Safe And Insubstantial. It Protects From Greater Flame. It Indicates Fire, But Obscures The Source. This Is Not A Useful City. Very Little Here Approaches Any Eidolon Of The Beautiful.

It's Frightening For One Artist To See Another One, Any Other One Turn Away From Art.

A Poet Is Wounded Into Speech, And He Examines These Wounds, Meticulously, To Discover How To Heal Them. The Bad Poet Harangues At The Pain And Yowls At The Weapons That Lacerate Him; The Great Poet Explores The Inflamed Lips Of Ruined Flesh With Ice-caked Fingers, Glittering And Precise; But Ultimately His Poem Is The Echoing, Dual Voice Reporting The Damages.