And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

Each servant stamps the reader with a look.

It never seems to occur to anyone that each reader is different, and that even those who might be said to resemble each other will each bring an individual set of experiences and references to their reading, and interpret and misinterpret it according to these.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.