Death Is What Makes Life Fun.

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.

This Is Not What It Is Like To Be You, I Realized As A Few Of Your Magnificent Clouds Flew Over The Rooftop. It Is Just Me Thinking About Being You. And Before I Headed Back Down The Hill, I Walked In A Circle Around Your House, Making An Invisible Line Which You Would Have To Cross Before Dark.

I Started Moving Away From Poets Like Wallace Stevens And Hart Crane And Started Reading Poets Like, Again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, And The British Poets Who Were Imported Through That Important Anthology Put Together By Alvarez - And Those Would Include Thom Gunn And Ted Hughes. And I Think These Poets Gave Me Assurance That There Were Other Ways To Write Besides The Rather Involuted Style Of High Modernism Whose High Priests Were Pound, Eliot And Stevens, And Crane Perhaps.

All They Want To Do Is Tie The Poem To A Chair With A Rope And Torture A Confession Out Of It. They Begin Beating It With A Hose To Find Out What It Really Means.

I Thought Originally When I Was In School And I Wanted To Be A Poet, I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be Miserable.