 In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing wood. Yeah, but the unconscious is a very funny thing, so see pontifically. You can take a dive in and you can come up with all kinds of garbage around your neck, or you can bring up something beautiful. I mean, in a sense, it's like nature. I suppose it is nature and interior nature, I mean. Poetry is, or the use of language is one of the differences between us and the apes. Poetry is language at its most memorable, at its best. For poetry, it's much greater and much wider than most people realize. I think that if poetry can be made accessible to the so-called general reader, if it can be heard, and I've written almost everything I've done, to be heard. Once that occurs, then there's usually understanding. But I think the barrier has been erected against poetry. Everything sort of militates against the radio, the television, the visual education. We're surrounded by all kinds of shoddy speech, by the cliches of advertising, by the bromides of editorials. To bring up a whole generation trained as it were on TV is to abandon part of the body, the ear. I believe very deftly that the Kierkegaardian notion that education begins when the teacher starts learning from the student, when it becomes, you know, a real reciprocity. Adolescence is peculiarly an interlude time, a time of being blurred or fuzzy or uncertain about what's going on. I said someplace that so much about adolescence is an ill-defined dying. Because we are always dying into ourselves than renewing ourselves. That's perhaps as good a definition as any. But what I try to do... The waking. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the ground. I shall walk softly there and learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. Great nature has another thing to do to you and me, so take the lively air and, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know, but falls away is always and is near. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. Actual composition of the poem for me is very rarely a thing that's just dashed off. One begins with a mood or something, then the actual writing, the genesis of it, I think usually takes the shape of a line or one or two or three lines, and these lines may accrete sort of gather similar lines and images, but it's bringing together the whole thing into a coherent whole that's hard for me. I mean, that's the ultimate and the final work. Almost invariably, I can tell when the thing is done or in its final form, there may still be some fiddling with the lines. My papa's waltz. I'd like to think Thomas Hardy is looking down from heaven and approving of this little piece. A whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy, but I hung on like death. Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pan slid from the kitchen shelf. My mother's countenance could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist was better than one knuckle. At every step you miss, my right ear scraped the buckle. You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltz me off to bed, still clinging to your shirt. Of course, I put in a few fibs there. My father's palm never was caked hard by dirt, but he simply loved those roses of his and often watered them far into the night. He'd come in in his rubber boots and cold, take himself a little shlok, and then I'd hook my feet over his rubber boots and we'd start dancing to his whistling. Cuttings later. This surge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, cut stems struggling to put down feet, what saints strain so much, rose on such lop limbs to a new life. I can hear underground that sucking and sobbing in my veins, in my bones I feel it, the small waters seeping upward, the tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginning, sheath wet, the slaw. In moving slow, he has no peer. You ask him something in his ear, he thinks about it for a year. And then, before he says a word, there upside down, unlike a bird, he will assume that you have heard a most exasperating love. But should you call his manner smug, he'll sigh and give his branch a hug. Then off again to sleep he goes, still swaying gently by his toe, and you just know he knows, he knows. Life listens. Oh, what could be more nice than her ways with a man? She kissed me more than twice, once we were left alone. Who'd look when he could feel? She's more sides than a seal. Close hair, faintly stirred, light deep into a bell, the love beat of a bird. She kept her body still and watched the weather flow, live by what we do. All's known, all all around, the shape of things to be, a green thing loves the green and loves the living ground. The deep shade gathers night, she changed with a changing light. We met to leave again, the time we broke from time, the cold air brought its rain, the singing, the stem. She sang a final song, like listening when she sang. But writing for me is not an easy thing to do. It's always difficult. I always am a terrified servant of feeling that, well, you know, the feeling after you get something done that you know is really good. But, well, is this the last time? I notice that Auden said the same thing in his The Making of Poetry. I sometimes try to render the object faithfully to see it as intensely as I can to turn that back into language and language that doesn't compete necessarily with a painter. The purely imagistic poetry is decidedly limited if it remains nothing more than image, however good. But it's my belief that a thing perceived finally, and one looks so long at the object or has looked at it habitually, or looked at it out of love as Wilkie would look at an animal in a zoo for hours on end until you become the object and it becomes you. It is an extension of consciousness. It seems to me that the reading of a good poem isn't itself a recreation of the poem. This is in looking at a picture that isn't. And that the experience itself is vicarious. That's one of the reasons we have art, isn't it? That is, the demand can experience other men's experiences. To realize that this is there, this can't happen or this does happen. Dolor. I have known the inexorable sadness of pensons and neat in their boxes, the doler of pad and paperweight, all the misery of manila folders and muesli, desolation in immaculate public places, lonely reception room, lavatory switchboard, the unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, ritual of multigraph, paperclip, comma, endless duplication of lives and objects, niacin dust on the walls of institutions, finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silicon, sift almost invisible to long afternoons of tedium, dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. I think the very good teaching is like the dance that's so related to a particular time and a place and in a sense it can't be recaptured. I mean, you know, astral. Allergy for Jane, my student, thrown by a horse. I remember the neck curls, limp and damp as tendrils and her quick look, a side-long pickle smile, and how one startled into talk, the light syllables leap forth and she balanced in the delight of her talk. I ran, happy, tailed to the wind, the song trembling the twigs in small branches, the shade sang with her, the leaves, her whispers turned to kissing, and the mole sang in the bleached valley under the rose. Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth even though father could not find her, scraping her cheek against straw, stirring the clearest water. My sparrow, you are not here, waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow. The sides of wet stones cannot console me, nor the moss, long with the last light. If only I could nudge you from this sleep, my maim darling, my skittery pigeon. Over this damp grave, I speak the words of my love. I, with no righteousness matter, neither father nor lover, but now a peace in all humility about one of the great dead, arouse for Wallace Stevens, setting as a young poet's saloon. Wallace Stevens? What's he done? He can play the Flitterflat. He can see the second son spinning to the lordly cloud. He's imagination's prince. He can plink the skitterbomb how he rolls the bouquets, brings a secret right in here. Wallace, Wallace, for his dare, never met him, Dutchman, dear. If I ate and drank like him, I would be a shanticleer. Speak it from the face, south to you. Here's a mensch, but don't sing dandy. Arouse, demon, souse, kipupin, altus, winterkin. Roarum, hoarum, cockalorum, the muses, they must all adore him. Wallace Stevens, are we for him? Brother, he's our father. There was a period when many poets were basing poems upon an epigraph. You know, the quotations in the Greek, that sort of thing. I finally found something my level in the sixth grade natural history book. It went most mammals, like caresses, in the sense in which we usually take the word, whereas other creatures, even tame snakes, prefer giving to receiving them. The pensive knew the state art of art, except caresses in the dark. The bear, equipped with paw and snout, would rather tame than dish it out. And snakes, both poisonous and garter, in love are never known to bark. But you, my dearest, have a soul encompassing fish, flesh, and foals. For namorous arts we would pursue you can, with pleasure, fill or crew. You are, in truth, one in a million, at once mammalian and reptilian. A poet should show as many sides of his nature as he can in all decency reveal. That includes the epigram, the aphorism, the joke, the song, the song-like poem, up to the very highly formalized lyric. It's there, perhaps, that I come closest to old W.B. Gates. But I think I do a different thing, technically. I end-stop the lines much more than he ever did. In other words, I'm using a style that was more current than the language was perhaps a little less sophisticated in the 16th century, in an effort to write a plain bear. It's an even terrible statement. But the one does it, of course, all the time. In the adamant, I had a kind of piece of luck. I fell into its fore, which is three, three-beat lines, and then a two-beat line each time. Originally, they were all three-beat lines in the first and second stanza and changing the wording in the last stanza. I came up with this curious cut-off effect, which, in a way, suggests, maybe, the action of a rock crusher. And it moved it from a palm opera that was just a poem into something where the rhythm was really integral with the feeling. The adamant thought does not crush to stone. The great sledge drops in vain. Truth never is undone. Its shafts remain. The teeth of knitted gear turn slowly through the night. But the truth's substance bears the hammer's weight. Compression cannot break a center so congealed. The tool and chip no plate. The core. Light seal. God music is the music that the old tellers make and the young ones in Western Ireland when there's neither fiddle nor squeeze box for the dancing. And it's a strange and almost Arabic thing at times. The refrain here attempts to approximate that kind of music. It's a tribute to three pub singers in Innisbeth and Ireland. I do not have a fiddle, so I get myself a stick and then I beat upon a can or pound upon a brick. And if the meter needs a change, I give the cat the kick. Whenever I feel it coming on, I need a morning drink. I get a stool and sit and stare to slop here by the sink. I lean my head near the brim and edge of the sink. Oh, the slopped paleo is the face to think in the perils of too early drink. Too early drink, too early drink and bring an innocent man down. I went fishing with the king in the dark of an old spit. Toon me hanker, she had fallen in with more than half a cone. I stared into the dented hole and what do you think? I saw a color pure pure as gold a color without flaw. A color without flaw, a color without flaw. I didn't stare and what do you think? I first came on and I had to drink. And I saw a shimmering lake of slime and shine and spit. And I kneeled down and did partake a bit of the lakes of it. And it reminded me, but oh, I'll keep my big mouth shut. It happened, though, in Boston town. The color of my tears was giving us brown, but it had a flavor all its own as I gulped it down, as I gulped it down. There, I'm in the ease of man, every now and then I did partake of it. Oh, the slopped paleo the face to think in a heralds of two early drinks. Two early drinks, two early drinks. We'll bring a good man down. And one of these pub boys said into God if you weren't reading it off of the book like the priest himself. Well, there's another aspect. The poet, presumably, it is in the foreground of consciousness. He is aware of things in a sense before they happen or before they generally happen. He is the one to whom the zeitgeist is most apparent. I mean, a public poet like Audon when he says we must love one another or die, he said it in a very few words. A very central thing in our civilization. The best modern poetry is characterized by a kind of terrible honesty of imagination. It is one of the things that we inherit from Blake. Poetry makes a sense of profound and terrible demand. It says change your life. And I think that that's why the general public backs away from poets like Bogan or Cunitz. They don't want their lives changed. They don't want to enter some other consciousness. They're in a sense they're unconsciously or consciously afraid. They don't want their lives changed. Some of these pieces begin in the mire as if van were a shape writhing from the old rock. This may be due in part to the Michigan from which I came. The marsh, the mire, the void is always there. The media can terrify. It's a splendid place of schooling the spirit. It's America. Nonetheless, in spite of all the muck and welter, the dark, the dreck of these poems, I still count myself a happy poet. I proclaim once more a condition of joy in a dark time. In a dark time the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening shade. I hear my echo in the echoing wood. A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the ram. Beasts of the hill and the circumstance of the dam. What's madness but an ability of soul at odds with circumstance? The day is on fire. Purity of pure despair. My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks is the cave or winding path. The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences. A night flowing with birds. A ragged moon. And in broad day the midnight come again. A man goes far to find out what he is. Death of a self. In a long, tearless night. All natural shapes. Blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light. And darker my desire. My soul like some heat maddened summer fly. Heat buzzing at the sill. Which eye is I? A fallen man I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself. And God the mind. And one is one. Free in a tearing wind. Maybe the kind of knowing that occurs in poetry is related at least to Satori. Because of that notion of the sitting still which goes beyond a mere quietism. I believe that one can suddenly become aware of another consciousness. A consciousness other than the immediate. A consciousness that is higher. I am most immoderately married. The Lord God has taken my heaviness away. I have merged like the bird with the bright air. And my thought flies to the place by the boat tree. Being. Not doing. I feel that poetry finally is a joyous thing once more of the round. What's greater? What can be known? The unknown. My true self runs for the hill more or more visible. Now I adore my life with the bird, the abiding leaf, with the fish, the clusting snail and the eye offering all. And I dance with William Blake for love. For love's sake. And everything comes to one as we dance on. Dance on. Dance on.