The Pen Is An Instrument Of Discovery

As Soon As I Start To Write I'm Very Aware, I'm Trying To Be Aware That A Reader Just Might Well Pick Up This Poem, A Stranger. So When I'm Writing - And I Think That This Is Important For All Writers - I'm Trying To Be A Writer And A Reader Back And Forth. I Write Two Lines Or Three Lines. I Will Immediately Stop And Turn Into A Reader Instead Of A Writer, And I'll Read Those Lines As If I Had Never Seen Them Before And As If I Had Never Written Them.

The Trouble With Poetry Is That It Encourages The Writing Of More Poetry.

When I Began To Dare To Be Clear, Because I Think Clarity Is The Real Risk In Poetry Because You Are Exposed. You're Out In The Open Field. You're Actually Saying Things That Are Comprehensible, And It's Easy To Criticize Something You Can Understand.

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.

I Was An Only Child, A Very Late Child, Born To Parents Who Were Both 39 At The Time, Which Was Very Late Back Then. That Kind Of Confirmed My Sense Of Being The Center Of The Universe, Which I Guess Every Child Feels - Children And Poets Both Tend To Feel.