Wise souls move through the dark only one step at a time.

Aim at getting up half an hour earlier than other people and walking if possible to catch a glimpse of the sea every morning. These walks should be very important to gaining a heightened consciousness of existence. The senses are most keen and receptive at such a time. Do the same if possible in the evening, sending your soul from your wrist like a Merlin hawk to fly to the stars, or to ride upon the wind or shiver in the rain above the housetops.

A long time back, maybe twenty-five years ago, a reviewer (Hudson Review, I think) ridiculed William Carlos Williams for saying one reason a poet wrote was to become a better person. I was fresh out of graduate school, maybe still there, filled with the New Criticism, and I easily sided with the reviewer. But now I see Williams was right. I don’t think Williams was advocating writing as therapy, nor the naive idea that after writing a poem one is any less depraved. I believe Williams discovered that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid.

My life’s wave is at its crest.
The thought of work becomes
a friend of the thought of rest …

There is a tingling in the nerves. A poem begins to happen. Selection of language begins in the darkroom of the imagination, the critical intelligence locked out, coming in to play only after a print is lifted out of the tray and hung on the wire to dry, the light switch on, revealing what is there. The critical intelligence discards blurred, dark or overexposed prints at this stage. Those that survive become subject to adjustment and refinement, unless the poet is one of those who insist on the sacredness of the first take. Preprocessing has occurred: the Polaroid Principle.

On one side there is luminosity, trust, faith, the beauty of the earth; on the other side, darkness, doubt, unbelief, the cruelty of the earth, the capacity of people to do evil. When I write, the first side is true; when I do not write, the second is. Thus, I have to write, to save myself from disintegration. Not much philosophy in this statement, but at least it has been verified by experience.

A poet, thrown into the international bouillabaisse where, if anything can be distinguished at all, it is only lumps of over-boiled fish and shrimp, suddenly discovers that he sits firmly in his province, his town, his countryside, and begins to bless it.