“No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life. That’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself whereas life alone is enough.”

“The most imprecise word of all: I”

“It is being written in kitchens. It is being written in the limp light of cheap 40-watt bulbs, while beside you, slouched in a chair or marooned on the couch your lover or your mother sleeps. There is the smell of liver and onions in the air. Waves of garlic descend upon the paper as you write. It is being written beside cat boxes or with old black-painted typewriters whose keys continually jam. It is being written while hamsters breed, where cockatoos work their beaks against the cage. It is morning in Alsace, Louisiana. Two poets arrive in an old black car which diesels after the motor is shut off. They step out off towards the lawn and there are greeted by a third, who is very excited, and wants to show them something. It is being written in tiny cabins up near the Arctic Circle where were it not for the ambivalent howling of the wind one could conceivably hear and be frightened by and take for one’s subject the ambivalent howling of the wolves. It is being written by men who no longer love their wives, who hate their fathers-in-law, by women who cheat on their husbands, by thousands of people old and young who feel molested by life, or cheated by the past, or crippled in the present. It is being written by young girls whose feet have ungainly long second toes, by young men with brains instead of muscles, and whose faces are moon scapes of acne, by young men whose parents cannot even read the labels off soup cans. People walk up and down the aisles of groceries and eye the soup cans. Housewives in put-up hair, in beige, shapeless and wrinkled raincoats shift in their choices between this kind of cracker or that bread, their eyes dull and glassy or ferocious with unacknowledged passion. A boy is stooping to line up bottles of fabric softener, self-conscious and hot around the collar. And he is a poet. Women stand pounding the check-out registers, from soup to nuts, free dog bones, mastocelli noodles, and all with migraines. And they are poets. The manager sits in his tiny booth and counts receipts, now and then staring out over the vast panorama which is this voiceless, heartless, mute and lonely humanity, robot-like as they, passing, push their wire carts. Someday, he will write the great poem of their souls. It is everywhere this poetry. It is the sacred name of every place, it is the nut and bolt, the bleeder valve, the kite string of reality. It is the deep end of the pool, whose water shivers, whose bottom backs off into blue. It is the unsung, the unsaid, it is the uttered and the barely felt, the blue bird, the red. It is the ache at midnight, the slap in the face, the letter, neglected for so long, we were meaning to write to that which within us has waited, aching for so long.”

“once upon a time” in other languages