A Note for These Poems . . .

There is no simple way to say anything—unless by that accident which is feeling, one is given, literally, the words in their own terms. It is here it all begins, an endlessly possible world. No one earns anything by it, nor can it be come to as an intention. What it all means is insistently more than any one sense of it will offer. Again and again it will happen, and in that demand its own occasion.

I can no longer remember what it was led me to try to write poems. I had no articulateness, and no sense of a place where such activity might be possible. But I don't think one knows more than that one has to and/or does write as he can.

David Franks has equally no alternative. There is no other way to say it.

In a dream one sees it,
a tongue, his own, floating
in a small bowl . . .

A long time ago Yeats said, In dreams begin responsibilities  . . .

This one is adamant.