Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
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.
Are we just avoiding our one true destiny when we do that, averting our glance from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?
Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song— one thing at a time and
Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
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 trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
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,...
The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his fath...
There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.
The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of...
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of infancy, part a literary calculation,
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...
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a bi...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone, so never mind, you’re fi...