There's Nothing Like A Shovel Full Of

The Male Frog In Mating Season," Said Crake, "makes As Much Noise As It Can. The Females Are Attracted To The Male Frog With The Biggest, Deepest Voice Because It Suggests A More Powerful Frog, One With Superior Genes. Small Male Frogs—it's Been Documented—discover If They Position Themselves In Empty Drainpipes, The Pipe Acts As A Voice Amplifier And The Small Frog Appears Much Larger Than It Really Is." So?" So That's What Art Is For The Artist, An Empty Drainpipe. An Amplifier. A Stab At Getting Laid.

The Genesis Of A Poem For Me Is Usually A Cluster Of Words. The Only Good Metaphor I Can Think Of Is A Scientific One: Dipping A Thread Into A Supersaturated Solution To Induce Crystal Formation. I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.

Craziness Was Considered Funny, Like All Other Things That Were In Reality Frightening And Profoundly Shameful.

Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Understand The Dead, I've Found; But Nothing Is More Dangerous Than To Ignore Them.

Every Ending Is Arbitrary, Because The End Is Where You Write The End. A Period, A Dot Of Punctuation, A Point Of Stasis. A Pinprick In The Paper: You Could Put Your Eye To It And See Through, To The Other Side, To The Beginning Of Something Else. Or, As Tony Says To Her Students, Time Is Not A Solid, Like Wood, But A Fluid, Like Water Or The Wind. It Doesn't Come Neatly Cut Into Even-sized Length, Into Decades And Centuries. Nevertheless, For Our Purposes We Have To Pretend It Does. The End Of Any History Is A Lie In Which We All Agree To Conspire.