Answer:
I've lost the exact quote, but there's a note in Nietzsche somewhere about old
philosophers and their tendency to issue declarations, assertions, without any
supporting arguments or augmentative proofs . . . this practice, he says, always
proceeds not from wisdom but from weariness . . . I think I've reached that decrepit
state, because I find myself impatient with process; I too want to write things that
simply declare, that baldly state conclusions, without my having to create or present
a viable context . . . I try to justify it to myself with the excuse of poetry's necessary
need for brevity, and I can find quotes from the greats to support that pose-stance,
but it's really age that's causing my slack-off . . . I'm 66 years old and I'm exhausted:
every poem in my work-folder is a letter of resignation. A plea for early (too late!)
retirement.
*
When does the President have me scheduled to die from Bird Flu? Not soon enough, I
hear some say.
*
I don't do it much now, but about 4 years ago I read R. S. Thomas everyday for months
on end. You could say I read him religiously, and the pun applies because while I told
myself I was reading him for the trenchant style and the tenacities of his craft,
inevitably I had to contend with the endless metaphors of Christianity that fill his
work: his poems are reiteratively if not exclusively concerned with the spiritual
life. . . . as I read him I grew envious over the wealth of tropes, the seemingly
limitless inscapes of figuration which Christianity provides for his poems. . . He
returns again and again to those traditional interactions and confrontations between
human and deity, and somehow brings the old ciphers if not back to life, at least back
to line. . . . I'm an atheist, I hate religion, but I understand the appeal of it for poets,
i.e. its rich repetoire of associations and subject matter . . . I could see why, in the
absence of other intellectual considerations, a poet might convert to any faith for
poetical reasons alone, never mind salvation. (The extravagant solidities of the
former outweigh the pathetic apparitions of the latter.) If only the choice were that
simple.
Explanation:
