Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.

Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons.

The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.

My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.

Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings.