I Say, Father, The Years

You Have To Follow Where The Poem Leads. And It Will Surprise You. It Will Say Things You Didn't Expect To Say. And You Look At The Poem And You Realize, 'that Is Truly What I Felt.' That Is Truly What I Saw.

I'm Afraid We Live At The Mercy Of A Power, Maybe A God, Without Mercy. And Yet We Find It, As I Have, From Others.

The Irony Is, Going To Work Every Day Became The Subject Of Probably My Best Poetry.

My Sense Of A Poem - My Notion Of How You Revise - Is: You Get Yourself Into A State Where What You Are Intensely Conscious Of Is Not Why You Wrote It Or How You Wrote It, But What You Wrote.

Back Then, I Couldn't Have Left A Poem A Year And Gone Back To It.