One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
I love America,” he’d tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.
Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.
The ambition of much of today’s literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.