I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.