But Some Nights, I Must Tell You,

…balancing The Wish To Be Lost With The Need To Be Found.

I Was Influenced By The Beats Because I Actually Just Began To Commit Adolescence Around 1955, When "howl" And Rebel Without A Cause And A Lot Of Other New Things Were Popping Up. (again I'm Trying To Give You A Finite Version Of This Career.) And Then I Came Under The Sway Of Wallace Stevens When I Was In College And Graduate School, And Basically Set As A Life Goal The Ambition Of Writing Third-rate Wallace Stevens. I Thought I Would Be Completely Content If I Was Recognized At Some Later Point In My Life As A Third-rate Wallace Stevens.

But My Heart Is Always Propped Up In A Field On Its Tripod, Ready For The Next Arrow.

Every Day Is For The Thief Is A Vivid, Episodic Evocation Of The Truism That You Can't Go Home Again; But That Doesn't Mean You're Not Free To Try. A Return To His Native Nigeria Plunges Cole's Charming Narrator Into A Tempest Of Chaos, Contradiction, And Kinship In A Place Both Endearingly Familiar And Unnervingly Strange. The Result Is A Tale That Engages And Disturbs.

Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As A Wallace Stevens Acolyte, I Wrote Very Difficult Poetry And I Was Really Guilty Of Not Knowing What I Was Talking About. I Was Going For A Kind Of Clever Verbal Effect. I Was Trying To Sound Linguistically Or Verbally Interesting. I Had A Sense, I Guess, From Just Reading A Lot Of Poetry Of How A Poem Would Start And How It Would End But Really I Didn't Know What I Was Doing. It Had Very Little Connection To My Life.