A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. |
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. |
But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. |
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based. |
But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds. |
Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen. |
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. |
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. |
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others. |
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. |
I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it. |
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. |
It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. |
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. |
It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. |