"The Crisis."
"Let me say in anger, that since the day we were married,
we have never had a towel where anyone could find it.
The fact, notwithstanding, that I am not
simple to live with, not my own judgment, but no matter.
There are other things.
To kiss you is not to love you, or not so simply.
Laughter releases rancor.
The quality of mercy is not strained."
Now, let me make this a little simpler for you.
Let me simply begin at the beginning of these poems that
are on this sheet.
I don't honestly think that, say,
someone, at least as myself writing,
is always precisely, or even in any actual sense,
conscious of what he is going to say.
For me, the writing of a poem is very much involved
with that kind of discovery of what I am going to say.
I remember Duncan's qualification
of the sense of it as saying, it's
akin to feeling that you want to take a walk.
You feel like taking a walk, or you feel something imminent.
And you feel, in that way, like writing a poem.
You don't know where the poem is going to take you.
You don't know that you're even going
to be successfully involved with trying to write it.
But you do feel this kind of, as he would put it,
readiness for the writing.
Now, in this first poem, "The Immoral Proposition,"
the actual content of the poem was, obviously,
not actually conceived of prior to the writing.
In other words, as I wrote, I began
to realize that what I was saying was open,
as each statement occurs, it was open to obvious qualifications.
And so, as I was writing, I tried
to get these qualifications into the actual statement.
And I end with what is, after all,
a kind of ironic resolution of the whole problem.