I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.
Write whatever you like!
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.
The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.
Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.
