Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.