A Motto I've Adopted Is, If At

The Really Authentic Thing About Humor Is That Anyone Can Pretend To Be Serious. Anyone Who's Ever Had A Job - In Fact, We're Pretending To Be Serious Now, More Or Less.

I Think Clarity Is The Real Risk In Poetry Because You Are Exposed. You're Out In The Open Field. You're Actually Saying Things That Are Comprehensible, And It's Easy To Criticize Something You Can Understand.

More Often Than Not In Poetry I Find Difficulty To Be Gratuitous And Show-offy And Camouflaging, Experimental To A Kind Of Insane Degree - A Difficulty Which Really Ignores The Possibility Of Having A Sensible Reader.

As Soon As I Start To Write I'm Very Aware, I'm Trying To Be Aware That A Reader Just Might Well Pick Up This Poem, A Stranger. So When I'm Writing - And I Think That This Is Important For All Writers - I'm Trying To Be A Writer And A Reader Back And Forth. I Write Two Lines Or Three Lines. I Will Immediately Stop And Turn Into A Reader Instead Of A Writer, And I'll Read Those Lines As If I Had Never Seen Them Before And As If I Had Never Written Them.

The Literary World Is So Full Of Pretension, And There's Such An Enormous Gap Between How Seriously Poets Take Themselves And How Widely They're Ignored By Everybody Else.