Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

I read books to read myself.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.