When I Stop Becoming, That's When I

If The Motive Of Writing Is For Some People A Kind Of Exercise In Dirty Laundry, That's One Thing. I've Always Thought Of My Poems As Meant To Be Overheard, As I Think All Of These Poems Are. It Seems To Me If You Get Experience Right, Even Your Most Painful Or Humiliating Experiences - If You Get Those Experiences Right For Yourself And Make Discoveries As You Go Along And Find For Them Some Formal Glue - They Will Be Poems For Others.

Connubial Because With Alarming Accuracy She’d Been Identifying Patterns I Was Unaware Of—this Tic, That Tendency, Like The Way I've Mastered The Language Of Intimacy In Order To Conceal How I Felt— I Knew I Was In Danger Of Being Terribly Understood.

The World Is Always Somewhat Vicious. I Take That As A Given, But At Various Times In Various Circumstances That Fact Will Be No More Than A Shadow Or An Echo Behind Some Poem. Other Times It Will Be More Manifest. I Try To Write Myself Into Articulations Of Half-felt, Half-known Feelings, Without Program. I'm Always Working Toward Getting My World And, Hopefully, The World Outside Of Me Into A Version That Makes Sense Of It. Viciousness Requires The Same Precision As Love Does.

There's A Certain Pleasure In Violating The Strictures Of Your Education. The Trick Is, If You're Going To Explore Ideas In A Poem, To Be Suspicious Of Ideas And Suspicious Of Your Own Mind At The Same Time. It's Often A Matter Of Orchestration And Pacing. Of Shaping Some Kind Of Dialectic Flow.

Exaggerated Sunsets / Splashed With Rain, Odd Collisions / Of Roots, Animals, Seeds. / I Didn't Like A Thing I Saw, / So Much Effort To Be Strange.