I need to reach beyond interior decoration, biography. Art is a way of melting out through one's skin. "What, who is this about?" is not the essential question. A poem is not about; it is out of and to. Passionate language in movement. The deep structure is always musical, and physical -- as breath, as pulse
art
What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others’ light, stained by each others’ shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.
The history of art looked more human than the art history books allowed, and ambition had more pathos in it than they allowed, either. Don't let me leave here trackless and alone, is all we plead for with fate, and ambition is a reflection of that panic. Ambition became art when we learned to be willing to defer the immediacy of the attention in order to make it count for more later.