Now then a more depressing newer book.
It's entitled Death and Friends because when
I put the manuscript together, I noticed
that at least half the poems in it
were something like death poems.
Very few are dramatically and precisely death poems, but--
and I was sure some critic in reading it would say,
well, he's got a fixation on death
and he's writing death poems.
So I thought if I called it Death and Friends,
it'd make it obvious that I was aware of it.
And the friends part of the title
comes from the sense that--
the sense of alienation or the sense of death,
or loss, or whatever in the poems
is balanced somewhat by some poems, which
talk about friendship as a saving grace,
human companionship as that which balances death
at least for a time.
I'm going to do something too, which perhaps I
shouldn't do in order to explain what I think
the nature of these poems is.
Because I do feel strange writing a lot of death poems.
I am not that terribly fixated on death
as a catastrophic event.
When I sent in the manuscript for this book,
the publisher asked me if I would make
some statement about the book.
And I wrote this up very hurriedly,
but it may give you some perspective
about some of the poems that may sound pretentious too.
I don't know.
It's fairly honest though.
Death and Friends is inescapably the product of life conditions
that require responsibility for others,
political and social apocalypse, marriage and teaching.
But as a poet, the moral ground I'm most familiar with
remains within myself.
I can only confront injustice, both private and social when
I'm-- out of some honest sense of self.
I'm not a man of action.
Therefore, I'm out of the mainstream of revolution.
What responsibilities I bear, I bear with confusion
and constant crisis.
I find myself-- maybe this is important.
The only thing that's important in describing the sense
of death within the poems.
I find myself thinking of death daily,
or maybe I should say partially experiencing it,
I hope, without morbidity.
The reasons are complex.
Some of them are particularly the mood of America.
But the outcome is a value of life, friendship, and pain,
especially pain which alerts.
It helps me too toward that kind of solitariness,
which informs responsibility and which
is more and more difficult to obtain.
Well, so much for that.