Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.