(Again I’m trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens.
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.
Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness.
I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
I could feel the day offering itself to me, and I wanted nothing more than to be in the moment-but which moment? Not that one, or that one, or that one.
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
