Nonfiction

I wanted to begin with perfectly simple things, things that were indivisible, safe from analysis. Without knowing it, I tried for years to write protocol sentences. My mistake was to think that such dregs, even had I reached them, were what I had to say, its "true" form, my "real" meaning. "John joy now." "John…

First of all: this is not going to read like an interview because when Asher and I went to see Backett it was to pay homage, not to pick his brain clean for the delectation of the nation. It was a conversation, not an interrogation. And second: The three of us drank most of a…

I Today the idea of writing poetry is generally an absurdity. Too many of us must come home from a day's routine labor before we can sit down to think and/or feel poetry within us. Flashes come and go during the working day and it is possible we see the world constantly through our poetic…