While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

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 rain.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Write the poem only you can write.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.