I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.
There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why.
Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
I write novellas because I don’t like loose sprawling prose.
I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony.
Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.
Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out.
Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
I find it impossible not to believe that there’s something in Irish blood that favors their power with words.
He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him.
I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.” I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.
The idea is to eat well and not die from it – for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.
I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It’s a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don’t notice.
There is nothing so immediately rewarded in American life, in the arts or anything else, as a shrill and limited consciousness.
There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all.
You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem.
Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner-and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.
I’ve been lucky to spend a life pretty close to the earth up here in the north. I learned in those three days that the earth is so much more than I ever thought it was. It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once. This makes it real hard to say good-bye. My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree.
It takes a long time for a father to drive the love out of a child.