I Still Believe In This Country, That

My Earliest Poems Were A Way Of Talking To Somebody. I Suppose To Myself.

I Say, Father, The Years Have Brought Me Here, Still Your Son, They Have Brought Me To A Life I Cannot Understand.

I Believed Even Then That If I Could Transform My Experience Into Poetry I Would Give It The Value And Dignity It Did Not Begin To Possess On Its Own. I Thought Too That If I Could Write About It I Could Come To Understand It; I Believed That If I Could Understand My Life—or At Least The Part My Work Played In It—i Could Embrace It With Some Degree Of Joy, An Element Conspicuously Missing From My Life.

Some Things You Know All Your Life. They Are So Simple And True They Must Be Said Without Elegance, Meter And Rhyme...they Must Be Naked And Alone, They Must Stand For Themselves.

Back Then, I Couldn't Have Left A Poem A Year And Gone Back To It.