You build a golf game like you build a wall, one brick at a time.
I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.
There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.
I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.
In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.
I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.
I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.
If I may take the risk of defining what a spiritual experience is, it is one in which pure awareness reveals itself to you as the maker of reality - where you suddenly discover through insight or meditation or a freak accident that your essential nature is spiritual, non-material.
The world hates us, but the bottom line is we're gonna have to show the world why they hate us by bombing the hell out of some people that have been hurting us. That's all. That's the end of it.
My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.
It is typical of women to fester and ferment over disappointments, slights, annoyances, angers, etc.