Activity

[...] Although Andy Warhol was personally more or less unequivocally loving about consumer culture his art-works were understood by the critical establishment to be seriously ironic and indeed they had that cutting edge to them. Some of the writing we are considering is closer in attitude to he wor…

I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so th…

I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of t…

Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived…

I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel…