Poetry is a necessity of life.

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.

I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.

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.

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.