The instinct to preplan has been around for a long time.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

I’m lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I’ll make the effort.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically – a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

It strikes me that after all the archbishops and politicos and true believers have their say on the ethics of the matter of euthanasia, bare fact sounds very compelling and very challenging.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has ‘civilized’ us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

[In the green scheme of things, death becomes a vehicle for land conservation and saving the planet.] It is not enough to be a corpse anymore, … Now, you have to be a politically correct...

The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also.

The same but different

This is what it’s like to be God.

It is not enough to be a corpse any more. Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse.

Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us...

It’s not that I’m against Cox and the people who run Cox right now. We don’t want to give that much authority to an unknown company, No. 1.

The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. “You fall head first,” he said....

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the...

If I were assigned poems I suppose I’d write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me...

I’m more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It’s not a retail experience. It’s an existential one.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.