Poetry notes/ a confessional:

Everything is fair game, open to us - reach doctoral levels of depravity or fly celestial heights of angels - cloyish, coy, absurd - we can exctracate truth from its slumbers, wallow in wealth of our gifts, or we can put all b.s. aside and write it, not as a compensatory escape that pretends to purge the scripturient burn within, but as a contribution to a world literature sorely needed at this time.

Watch for poets who memorize (not performance poets) their favorite poems. They should take this time for more reading and far more writing.

Personally, as a 84-year-old poet, I must guard against literal-mindnessness (from years of 'loose' fiction writing). Guard against narrowness, loss of cerebral energy, comic energy, reinforce more breadth of reason, turn metaphor upside down, shake new magic in the bag, not just the professor's prosaic, Entrance, Signification and Revelatory Ending.

Life isn't that well packaged, either, except, perhaps, the entrado (I heard Octavio Paz champion 'the entrance' before he died in Mexico City. I could use more magnanimity, make poetry richer, stronger, more accessible to people of all walks of life (knowing all the time it's poets who read the most to each other because that's where their interest lies).

I must remember that narrative poetry, in particular, is crafted from sequence and consequence story lines, a reticulation of images, places, that shape their own beginnings and endings.

Like most poets I must thaw out the cynical, strive for a more radiant virtuosity, diversity, humanity, love of language. I must spice it with inventiveness, a fresh intellectual and emotional range - anything that works - double associations, triple internal rhythms, aesthetic complexities, because, after all, we live in a changing new world of images, ideas, and feelings. It takes a poetry to match.