Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were ha...
I Love You'Early on, I noticed that you always say itto each of your childrenas you are getting off the phone with themjust as you never fail to say itto me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.It'...
The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read,never even heard of,as...
This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the lett...
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of infancy, part a literary calculation,
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
And when my heart is beatingtoo rapidly in the dark,I will go downstairs in a robe,open it up to a blank page,
Eastern Standard TimePoetry speaks to all people, it is said,but here I would like to addressonly those in my own time zone,this proper slice of longitudethat runs from pole to snowy poledown the glob...
Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song— one thing at a time and
No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising u...
Saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the rea...
It is possible to be struck by a meteoror a single-engine planewhile reading in a chair at home.Safes drop from rooftopsand flatten the odd pedestrianmostly within the panels of the comics,but still,...
But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while in the home of the...
Central Park It’s hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Am...
I had to send away for thebeacuse they are not available in any store.They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames,but instead of filtering out the harmfulrays of the sun....
I would rather eat at the bar,but such behavior is regardedby professionals as a form of denial,so here I am seated aloneat a table with a white tableclothattended by an elderly waiter with no name–id...
In a while, one of us will go up to bedand the other one will follow.Then we will slip below the surface of the nightinto miles of water, drifting down and downto the dark, soundless bottomuntil the w...
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
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