I Was A Pretty Happy Kid, I

There Are Just Long Gaps Where I Can't Find A Point Of Insertion, I Can't Find A Good Opening Line, I Can't Find A Mood That I Want To Write Into. But Once I Do, Once A Line Falls Out Of The Air, Or I Get A Little Inkling Of A Subject And I Recognize That, It's Like The Sense That A Game Has Started.

One Of The Ridiculous Aspects Of Being A Poet Is The Huge Gulf Between How Seriously We Take Ourselves And How Generally We Are Ignored By Everybody Else.

And The Reason I Am Writing This On The Back Of A Manila Envelope Now That They Have Left The Train Together Is To Tell You That When She Turned To Lift The Large, Delicate Cello Onto The Overhead Rack, I Saw Him Looking Up At Her And What She Was Doing The Way The Eyes Of Saints Are Painted When They Are Looking Up At God When He Is Doing Something Remarkable, Something That Identifies Him As God.

I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

I Find It Strange That - At Least In My Take On It - The People Who Are The Most Alarmed About The Dire Times We Live In Are The Ones Who Seem To Be Humorless, In Their Taste For Poetry Anyway. Humor Is Just An Ingredient. It's Always Been In Poetry. It Kind Of Dropped Out Of Poetry I Think During The 19th And Up To The Mid-twentieth Century. But It's Found Its Way Back. And It's Simply An Ingredient.