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“Poetry is as world-building as science fiction, I am always telling my students, and the richness of its experience as a reader often comes from immersion in and surrender to the poet’s total work. But for the casual reader, a single poem – or single book – might be all there is. There seems to be no way to get around this: a poem appears as a closed form in isolation, but in fact it exists as an ongoing and open form in the actuality of practice. The rewarding, complex projects of contemporary poets, often made of both verse and prose, sometimes of images, performance, experiment, criticism, and ritual, are so often held and judged in the page length example or single volume. (And I don’t even believe that the book itself is a “natural” or representative habitat of poetry. I would read complete works if I could, of every poet I read, or accruing works, scrolls the size of lifetimes, the scraps hidden away in notebooks and letters, scrawled on postcards, buried in torrents of prose.) A few words, then, are made to distill a lifetime of poetry, which is not impossible, of course – and I, like other poets, seek to make both the small and the large thing, an object and a world. But the specimen poem, in its way, is a deprivation of the ground of complexity and duration in which the poem figures.”

“I have struggled all my life to cure this tendency to daydream, lest it should carry me into remote waters. But the effort of swimming against this gentle current takes away some of my vital strength. And if, in fighting off daydreams, I gain in terms of action, I inwardly lose something very precious which can never be replaced. But one of these days I shall have to go, without worrying where I might end up.”