We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.

Dreaming men are haunted men.

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.

Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.

The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day - no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms.