Write The Poem Only You Can Write.

I'm Speaking To Someone I'm Trying To Get To Fall In Love With Me. I'm Trying To Speak Intimately To One Person. That Should Be Clear. I'm Not Speaking To An Audience. I'm Not Writing For The Podium. I'm Just Writing, Trying To Write In A Fairly Quiet Tone To One Other Reader Who Is By Herself, Or Himself, And I'm Trying To Interrupt Some Silence In Their Life, Which Is Utterance.

Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As A Wallace Stevens Acolyte, I Wrote Very Difficult Poetry And I Was Really Guilty Of Not Knowing What I Was Talking About. I Was Going For A Kind Of Clever Verbal Effect. I Was Trying To Sound Linguistically Or Verbally Interesting. I Had A Sense, I Guess, From Just Reading A Lot Of Poetry Of How A Poem Would Start And How It Would End But Really I Didn't Know What I Was Doing. It Had Very Little Connection To My Life.

I Write With A Uni-ball Onyx Micropoint On Nine-by-seven Bound Notebooks Made By A Canadian Company Called Blueline. After I Do A Few Drafts, I Type Up The Poem On A Macintosh G3 And Then Send It Out The Door.

I Can Hear The Library Humming In The Night, A Choir Of Authors Murmuring Inside Their Books Along The Unlit, Alphabetical Shelves, Giovanni Pontano Next To Pope, Dumas Next To His Son, Each One Stitched Into His Own Private Coat, Together Forming A Low, Gigantic Chord Of Language.

Every Day Is For The Thief Is A Vivid, Episodic Evocation Of The Truism That You Can't Go Home Again; But That Doesn't Mean You're Not Free To Try. A Return To His Native Nigeria Plunges Cole's Charming Narrator Into A Tempest Of Chaos, Contradiction, And Kinship In A Place Both Endearingly Familiar And Unnervingly Strange. The Result Is A Tale That Engages And Disturbs.