my break

James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break, the book that hooked me on poetry.

more than a game

Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life on.
—Hans Ree

Poetry is beautiful enough to waste your life on.

word worker

Poetry not as a hobby but as obsession.

crazy craft

When craft transcends control and becomes obsession, it starts to get interesting again.

obsessed or possessed

If only this poem would let me alone so that I might live.

ongoingingness

                                   ...but, of

course, there are beaches and galaxies and
long, long poems: I’ve begun to think that
nothing in the world is so important as a long,
long poem, a place anyone’s obsession can be

found lost in, an ongoingingness too reliable to
conclude, a problem that doesn’t finish
its way out of existence, a clinging that holds
clinging on as its enterprise...

—A.R. Ammons, from “Scarcities,” an unpublished poem, typescript dated Sept. 15, 1986, Chicago Review (A. R. Ammons issue; 57: 1 / 2 Summer/Autumn 2012)

finish it

The poem that wouldn’t give up on me.

each one save one

I’m comforted by the thought that if I’m ever put under government surveillance the agent who follows me, who monitors my phone calls, who reads my emails and tracks my web-surfing, who searches through the papers in my recycle bin, will learn a lot about poetry. In fact, after two-years on my case, the agent could be awarded an honorary MFA in Poetry.