Walk On Air Against Your Better Judgement.

A Writer Is Not Different From A Reader, In That The Common Ragbag Of Orthodoxies And Assumptions Is What A Poet Has To Work With As Well.

Memory Has Always Been Fundamental For Me. In Fact, Remembering What I Had Forgotten Is The Way Most Of The Poems Get Started.

The Ability To Start Out Upon Your Own Impulse Is Fundamental To The Gift Of Keeping Going Upon Your Own Terms. . . . Getting Started, Keeping Going, Getting Started Again In Art And In Life, It Seems To Me This Is The Essential Rhythm.

Anything Can Happen Is Also, Incidentally, A Poem That Arose From Teaching. I'd Talked About The Horace Ode (i, 34) [on Which The Poem Is Based] In A Lecture I Gave At Harvard In The Fall Of 2000 Entitled Bright Boltsand Remembered It After The Twin Towers Attack.

The Fact Of The Matter Is That The Most Unexpected And Miraculous Thing In My Life Was The Arrival In It Of Poetry Itself - As A Vocation And An Elevation Almost.