I believe that poetry is a training in expectation and perception. A poetic is an epistemology and a technique; it is a way of knowing and a method for putting it into practice. Life and poetry are not separable. I believe that the world is as real as I am, and that the data of my senses are the particulars of a shared world. I therefore try to write in terms of those particulars. William James said that emotion is physiological and that the meaning of a proposition is the set of its actual consequences. If our minds and bodies are not dissociated, poems will have bodily effects and their meanings will be their consequences in our lives.
1 October 1981