Oh, well that's an interesting question.
The question is that since I use these personal experiences that
are often painful, what their connection is to poetry.
Poetry explains nothing really.
I mean, it really doesn't explain anything.
For me, one of the challenges of poetry
is to be there in that particular moment
with whatever has happened and to be
able to speak in a way that resists
all of the means of evasion that we have all cultivated so well.
And speech of course, is also an evasion.
So I really don't feel that the poetry explains anything.
I mean, but I do see poetry as a deeply human art in that--
for me, it's about becoming a human being.
And so naturally since these sorts of things
do happen, I neither obey them nor really go toward them.
I mean the-- first time that I really
decided that I wanted to be a poet was I was nine years old
and I had an English assignment and we were supposed to write
three quatrains with rhyme and meter about our favorite place
and at that time we lived in Vermont.
And my favorite place was a meadow by a stream
so I went there and you know, I've
got my notepad and everything.
And I was so frustrated because I couldn't say anything
about how I felt about that place
or express my own sense of it or the place itself.
And it was that frustration that made me a poet.
Basically, I mean, I think these things are there any way.
I mean for instance, my brother's death.
I would have had to confront that in any case,
whether I wrote poetry or not.
And-- no.
I don't know.
Poetry it's not for me in any way therapeutic.
It's not a kind of--
it's not-- I know people for whom it is but for me,
it's not.
And that's because it's so much something else.
I mean, it's a kind of--
for me, it comes out of this ground
of being where you do not have to be
where you don't need therapy.
In other words, where you don't need--
you don't need the consolation.
You have the existence of what is.
So it has a kind of spiritual value
to me that I can't really put into any of the other readily
available forms that there are.
If for instance, if I were looking.
There's no reason really to write poetry in order
to find something therapeutic.