Form Is Any Aspect Of A Poem

When I'm Constructing A Poem, I'm Trying To Write One Good Line After Another. One Solid Line After Another. You Know A Lot Of The Lines - Some Hold Up Better As Lines Than Others. But I'm Not Thinking Of Just Writing A Paragraph And Then Chopping It Up.

Listeners Are Kind Of Ambushed... If A Poem Just Happens To Be Said When They're Listening To The Radio. The Listener Doesn't Have Time To Deploy What I Call Their 'poetry Deflector Shields' That Were Installed In High School - There's Little Time To Resist The Poem.

I Think A Good Poem Should Have Some Inscrutable Part. You Can't Quite Explain It. The Poem Can Only Explain Itself To A Certain Limit And At That Point You Enter Into A Little Bit Of Mystery. That For Me Is The Perfect Poem: To Begin In Clarity And To End In Mystery.

The Name Of The Author Is The First To Go Followed Obediently By The Title, The Plot, The Heartbreaking Conclusion, The Entire Novel Which Suddenly Becomes One You Have Never Read, Never Even Heard Of, As If, One By One, The Memories You Used To Harbor Decided To Retire To The Southern Hemisphere Of The Brain, To A Little Fishing Village Where There Are No Phones.

But Tomorrow, Dawn Will Come The Way I Picture Her, Barefoot And Disheveled, Standing Outside My Window In One Of The Fragile Cotton Dresses Of The Poor. She Will Look In At Me With Her Thin Arms Extended, Offering A Handful Of Birdsong And A Small Cup Of Light.