I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
I was taught that poems don’t end, they just kind of stop. There’s never an ending to a poem; it’s a continuation for later. When I write, I write for me, and I write in poetic form.
I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.
My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It’s like a disease – my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.
A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Howl,’ you can hear a cantor between the lines. It’s fully alive, and I think that’s what’s missing in modern poetry. It’s too dry and cerebral.
It was in a stonecutter’s house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery’s grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been writing – first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing.
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I’ve looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry’s gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.
I just sit down and write. I never know when. The most recent one is ‘Sarah Still,’ which is about our life, Sarah and me. It’s my favorite of all my poems.
I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels – horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
