Stories Are The Reproductive Organs Of Language.

A Lot Of Poems Seem, In Some Sense, To Pull The Outside World Into The Interior. They Aren't Perhaps Emotion Recollected In Tranquillity But Perception Recollected In Interiority.

Many Intellectual Heroes In The European Tradition Seem To Find The Great Outdoors A Chilling Prospect - And Its Literary Analogue, The Mythworld, Equally Chilling. As If A World In Which Humans Have No Leverage, And Might Not Be Present At All, Couldn't Be Interesting To Humans.

Nature, Or The World, Or Reality, Is What Mythology Is All About.

I Think Of Something Quite Different From A Snapshot. I Know Of A Lot Of Poems, Some Very Fine Ones, That Are Like Snapshots, But I'm More Interested In Poetry That Is Like An Endless Film, Long Stories, Things That Weave Together Many Different Strands, Like A Big Piece Of Cloth, Not Like A Photograph.

Every Native North American Text I've Ever Grappled With Has Taught Me Something Important About How To Live On The Continent Where I Was Born.