The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1851

Since most crimes are committed in a state of somnambulism, one might say that the function of the moral sense consists in wakening the dreadful dreamer in the nick of time.
Paul Valery, Tel Quel, 1941-1943.


To designate a dreamed world well, it is necessary to mark it with a happiness.
Gaston Bachelard

For every appetite, there is a world.
Gaston Bachelard

We are frustrated with the poverty of experience because our appetites exceed our needs. We call these appetites ambitions so we can keep on stuffing ourselves. And why not?

The sporadic and the occasional.

Harshness of survival.

Poetry is the romantic return to the "wilderness" of risky questions.The sense of risk in the forming of a romantic relationship is an example of this. To don the priest or priestess garb is more difficult in our time for a poet. And realistically, the churches of today with their texts well in place are open to new textual offering.

Love needs the image of committment, if not its hope or promise, to exist. But this is the unspoken in the domain (But this is the doman of the unspoken).

The successful person feels well supplied. So there are many bizarre forms of success- but they all have a quality in common.

(10/18-19/90)