Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now).

I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people or creatures or places - the same spirit but moving through things, not static.

"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.

Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being.

D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's also new. Or: there's nothing "new" in the human heart, but it still matters lots.

Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.