scriptions -- I mean that they are fi rst and last about subjects, not ob-
jects, despite what may be appearance to the contrary. They arose
usually when I had some time to myself, which perhaps gives them
their pre- or post-social character, and they are put as plainly as I
could manage.
to be in the physical universe, with its always individual near-at-hand
doings and beings, human and otherwise; the whole show shading
off into immensity and vagueness, and (however splendid or fright-
ful or dull or, ultimately, unimaginably strange) with its bare unre-
lenting factuality hurtling along impassively as it does, in a kind of
fi nal dignity. Some sense of this preceded by a long time the writing
of the poems, I suppose, and has something to do with their unre-
constructed realism and particularity.
make their contribution to the ensemble: what counts for me in any
collection is less the individual poem than the individual life, fi nd-
ing its way somehow, anyhow, directly and otherwise, into the whole
work....