Poetry, I feel is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak.
Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood—the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen.
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
Mountains terrify me—they just sit about, they are so proud.
