The Problem With Describing Poets As Legislators

Poetry Had In The Hands Of Various People Become A Place For Inconvenient Knowledge Insofar As It Was A Place For Knowledge At All. But It Was A Place Where You Could Talk About Other Kinds Of Experience Than The Official Version.

Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death On A Massive Scale For Economic Domination Or Revenge. And The Task, Taken As A Task, Appeals To The Imagination. The Military Is An Engineering Profession.

They Are The Kinds Of Things That Make Us A Community: Attachment To Place, Attachment To Local Arts Traditions, The Ability To Read Literature, The Ability To Look At Paintings, The Sense Of Connectedness To The Land, The Sense Of Community That Comes From People Taking Care Of Their Own.

Poetry Is A Man Arguing With Himself; Rhetoric Is A Man Arguing With Others.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.