There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.

At daybreak, during those inchoate Moments before waking, I had embraced A woman, lying in a waving field of Spring grass, with so much wanting That when I sat up rubbing sleep From my eyes, I forgot everything – Where we were, how we met, even Who she was, except this residue of Desire that is still flaming my breath.

Notes: During these glorious, and gloriously empty, spring days, I have been seeing these verse dreams – crazy edifices of whole lines, whole stanzas, which are perhaps the echoes of poems I hadn’t written down. And since I am yet to devise a system to somehow bottle all these flickering flashes of fire-words, somehow press them into paper, so as to scorch it slightly with these ink tattoos, all that is left to do is to report the aftermaths.