You're Rowing By Wordlight

A Poem, Being An Instance Of Language, Hence Essentially Dialogue, May Be A Letter In A Bottle Thrown Out To The Sea With The-surely Not Always Strong-hope That It May Somehow Wash Up Somewhere, Perhaps On The Shoreline Of The Heart. In This Way, Too, Poems Are En Route: They Are Headed Towards. Toward What? Toward Something Open, Inhabitable, An Approachable You, Perhaps, An Approachable Reality. Such Realities Are, I Think, At Stake In A Poem.

We Are Told That When Hölderlin Went 'mad,' He Constantly Repeated, 'nothing Is Happening To Me, Nothing Is Happening To Me.'

Only Truthful Hands Write True Poems. I Cannot See Any Basic Difference Between A Handshake And A Poem.

Poetry Is Perhaps This: An Atemwende, A Turning Of Our Breath. Who Knows, Perhaps Poetry Goes Its Way—the Way Of Art—for The Sake Of Just Such A Turn? And Since The Strange, The Abyss And Medusa’s Head, The Abyss And The Automaton, All Seem To Lie In The Same Direction—is It Perhaps This Turn, This Atemwende, Which Can Sort Out The Strange From The Strange? It Is Perhaps Here, In This One Brief Moment, That Medusa’s Head Shrivels And The Automaton Runs Down? Perhaps, Along With The I, Estranged And Freed Here, In This Manner, Some Other Thing Is Also Set Free?

The Language With Which I Make My Poems Has Nothing To Do With One Spoken Here, Or Anywhere.