As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.