* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

No day is safe from news of you.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

There is more than one good way to drown.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.