I Will Try To Disappoint You Better

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.

Although I Know It's Unfair, I Reveal Myself One Mask At A Time.

Poetry Does So Many Different Things, It's Difficult To Say Anything Definitive About Its Role, Which Of Course Varies From Culture To Culture. It Can Range From Being Stories Of The Tribe To The Private Lyric, To Being As W.h. Auden Said "the Clear Expression Of Mixed Feelings" To Nonsense Verse.

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.

All Good Poems Are Victories Over Something.