poetry

I’d go up to Concord Deli thinking about whether
I could be a writer some day. If I would ever learn to
smoke, curse & two-step against a hot stove 
while my children grew up under my own roof.
What would it cost me, or my family, to make up stories?

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

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.