The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are

Few Poets Have Made A More Interesting Rhetoric Out Of Just Fooling Around: Turning Things Upside Down, Looking At Them From Under The Sofa, Considering Them (and Their Observer) Curiously Enough To Make The Reader Protest, "that Were To Consider It Too Curiously.

I Don't Need To Praise Anything So Justly Famous As Frost's Observation Of And Empathy With Everything In Nature From A Hornet To A Hillside; And He Has Observed His Own Nature, One Person's Random Or Consequential Chains Of Thoughts And Feelings And Perceptions, Quite As Well. (and This Person, In The Poems, Is Not The "alienated Artist" Cut Off From Everybody Who Isn't, Yum-yum, Another Alienated Artist; He Is Someone Like Normal People Only More So - A Normal Person In The Less Common And More Important Sense Of Normal.)

We Can't Tell Our Life From Our Wish

The Southern Past, The Southern Present, The Southern Future, Concentrated Into Gertrude's Voice, Became One Of Red Clay Pine-barrens, Of Chain-gang Camps, Of Housewives Dressed In Flour Sacks Who Stare All Day Dully Down Into Dirty Sinks.

If We Were In The Habit Of Reading Poets Their Obscurity Would Not Matter; And, Once We Are Out Of The Habit, Their Clarity Does Not Help.