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My other school poem is called
"At This Point on the Page."

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"Frightened at the
slope of the writing,

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I looked up at the student
who shared it with me.

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Such pain was in the
crossing of each T,

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and a heart that skipped,
lurched in the loop of the Y.

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Sorrowing for the huddled
words my eyes had seen,

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the terror of those Os and
As and those draggled Gs,

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I looked up at her face,
not wanting to read farther,

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at least by prose.

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The hand shook that wrote
that far on the page.

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And what way it formed
each letter, God knows."

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To read this with those
little words at the end,

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God knows, connecting with
prose a couple of lines

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above makes me think that--

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of another thing I'd like to
try to assert about writing.

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I wouldn't like to think
of myself as a poet,

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but as a writer, just
with the language.

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And one reason is that
I had been brought up--

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had this feeling that a poet is
a person who is intermittently

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responsible for the sound.

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It goes da, da, da, da, da, da,
da, da, June, da, da, da, da,

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da, da, da, da, moon.

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And the scene didn't
amount to very much to me.

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And I still think it
doesn't, but I no longer

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think that's what writing is.

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But instead, a writer is totally
responsible for the sound so

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that, well, instead of rhyme,
which I still recognize,

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sort of, I think about,
well, maybe chime or some--

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or like this.

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Instead of thinking that
some syllables rhyme

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with other syllables, and the
others are just neutral, just

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to sort of in the way, I think
that all syllables rhyme,

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sort of.

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Indulge me for a minute.

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That is, any syllable sounds
more like any other syllable

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than it sounds like silence.

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So you start from this end
instead of from the other end.

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And this makes
everything go along.

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And it's all either
helping or hurting

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or neutral that it might
as well be helping.

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And that doesn't always mean
just rhyming by any means.