Perhaps you have heard the rumors of big money in poetry Maybe that’s why everybody is writing it these days Even Emily Dickinson must have heard these rumors Myself, I suspected as much 50 years ago And started early to accumulate my hoard of poe

The house had to be clean - I mean thorough-clean - when he got home from the pit for his tea, or he’d throw his plate at the wall and the gravy would run down onto the carpet. There was always gravy.

You know moments like these. You know how your mother ruins them.

Four Quartets is a slender book which/ can be read with intensity in its entirety

It happened right after I had taken my Uzi to work, retrieved it from my Brooks Brothers briefcase, and fired it upon my desk and its assorted discontents, their paper lives bunched together by clips and notary stamps of approval, now set flying and free. I then walked into…

Slept on a chair last night in the Springfield, Mass., bus terminal. It was March, and a dude in shorts asked: "Yo, you smoke trees?" I said, "Sure. Who doesn't?" He said, "You buyin'?" I said, "Nope, I'm going out of the country." He smiled and said, "Alright." He started…

The inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhood steered clear of the Lot, mindful of its existence, its countless drags of scrap, drenched with the fused association of many scenes and emotions from memory and experience. Left to its own devices, the place is now…

Call it a spell or a prayer or a ritual; it worked.

So ya think you’re a writer? First of all, shut up. No, seriously, the very first thing you need to do, this very instant, is to just shut your mouth and take a seat.

The figure eight will fall on its side. Become infinity.

Effie reckons the river her sister keeps asking about, the Great Pee Dee, was named after some Indians.

Not long ago, Owen the Second showed her a skull. He kept it in a brown cardboard box in the top of the closet. "My first wife," he said, and sneered, his lip bunching up around a scar just under his nose.

When I first arrived/footling-breeched/you two were there/ahead of me.

My music teacher, Luigi Biagi, told me that he was done with me. He said it was time I moved on to more specialized teachers. Since my passion was composing and arranging, he recommended Al Fine.

And you lean forward and all of that caffeine anxiety rises up in your throat, the pressure in your jaw, a series of weights and pulleys on your teeth and at the back of your mouth. So when you open your mouth to talk, no sound is made, only the sound of