Poetry is a necessity of life.

Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

I think a book-length poem stands about as good a chance as a collection of individual poems in reaching its field of ears. This does not mean I have not found some of them too daunting to read all the way through, but it would seem there ought to be some ambition on the writer's part to create a work that would be "a read" all the way through. If not, all the pleasure belongs to the maker, and that in itself is something, an achievement.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation