…pleasure, of course, is a slippery word…. Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure’s source.
And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young
Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.
I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.
I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
I’m speaking to someone I’m trying to get to fall in love with me. I’m trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I’m not speaking to an audience. I’m not writing for the podium. I’m just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I’m trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn – I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.
You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
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 was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
