stephanie roberts’s Reviews > The Gazer Within > Status Update

For us, what is near is often far away from us, what is far off remains remote even when we erase the distance between it and us, Heidegger thought.

I had this sudden idea of myself being able to say something that was terribly frank and honest and uncompromising and which might, in fact, be poetry.

When I think of myself thirty years from now, I have trepidition about saying anything. I don't know what will happen: I don't know who will be around to read me, or whether I'm a shriek in the void. But it is obvious that some works might last—I do feel that.

I write, first, for myself.

The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.

My most frequent problem as a poet is to have no subject, to have "nothing at heart," an ailment that Stevens once defined as misery. The corollary to such misery is an extreme and moody self-consciousness, which of course prevents me from finding anything worth writing about.~Larry Levis

One of my old teachers once suggested that the time in which anyone is born is a particular violation done to him, and one from which he can never recover.

If the "we" of the younger poets is a plural pronoun, it is also obsessed with loss, but I think it is a loss more profound than the loss of political goals or partisan feelings. Part of what got lost is the possibility of wholly believeing in the grand fiction of Romantic alienation and individuation.

and so many others appear to have experienced a kind of orphaning by and in America. It may be that this experience, this new homelessness, is what a number of these new poets have in common when they practice the "meditional" mode—for what they tend to hold in common is, at heart, a contradiction: an intimate shared isolation.