Poetry Is Language Surprised In The Act

When You Look Back On A Lifetime And Think Of What Has Been Given To The World By Your Presence, Your Fugitive Presence, Inevitably You Think Of Your Art, Whatever It May Be, As The Gift You Have Made To The World In Acknowledgment Of The Gift You Have Been Given, Which Is The Life Itself... That Work Is Not An Expression Of The Desire For Praise Or Recognition, Or Prizes, But The Deepest Manifestation Of Your Gratitiude For The Gift Of Life.

I Associate The Garden With The Whole Experience Of Being Alive, And So, There Is Nothing In The Range Of Human Experience That Is Separate From What The Garden Can Signify In Its Eagerness And Its Insistence, And In Its Driving Energy To Live -- To Grow, To Bear Fruit.

Some Poems Present Themselves As Cliffs That Need To Be Climbed. Others Are So Defensive That When You Approach Their Enclosure You Half Expect To Be Met By A Snarling Dog At The Gate. Still Others Want To Smother You With Their Sticky Charms.

Deftly They Opened The Brain Of A Child, And It Was Full Of Flying Dreams.

In My Darkest Night, When The Moon Was Covered And I Roamed Through Wreckage, A Nimbus-clouded Voice Directed Me: "live In The Layers, Not On The Litter." Though I Lack The Art To Decipher It, No Doubt The Next Chapter In My Book Of Transformations Is Already Written. I Am Not Done With My Changes.