It's A Rare Gift, To Know Where

Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.

When You Work In Form, Be It A Sonnet Or Villanelle Or Whatever, The Form Is There And You Have To Fill It. And You Have To Find How To Make That Form Say What You Want To Say. But What You Find, Always--i Think Any Poet Who's Worked In Form Will Agree With Me--is That The Form Leads You To What You Want To Say.

All Times Are Changing Times, But Ours Is One Of Massive, Rapid Moral And Mental Transformation. Archetypes Turn Into Millstones, Large Simplicities Get Complicated, Chaos Becomes Elegant, And What Everybody Knows Is True Turns Out To Be What Some People Used To Think.

Much Arrogance Is Necessary Equipment For An Artist, I Think. Not Sufficient, But Necessary. It Carries One Across The Gaps.

Writers Have To Get Used To Launching Something Beautiful And Watching It Crash And Burn. They Also Have To Learn When To Let Go Control, When The Work Takes Off On Its Own And Flies, Farther Than They Ever Planned Or Imagined, To Places They Didn't Know They Knew.