American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.

A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst.

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.

It's to a younger people's advantage to work with evolving computer technologies that provide so many ways to explore the use and distribution of text, including sound, images and motion.

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

Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.