A poet's addiction is to words. This is in fact the class definition of the poet. As misfit form, the poem process embodies, constantly acts out this class status in itself, indirectly also becoming an abstract mold for other spiritual states of disaffection. The obsessive theme of every American poet worth its salt, it seems to me, is converting dispossession, nothingness, vulnerability into power by asserting, weaving out an idiosyncratic, non-productive tongue, which destroys and recreates the meanings, associations around words through the solitary freedom of the poet. The poet writes for the bedrock part of the self, the spirit, the core which escapes the productive cycle.
American poems are landscapes of the spirit.
In fact, the class definition of the spirit is to be beyond the productive cycle. Each poem process invents the ideal audience to which the rearranged language is transparent, blindingly clear. The moment this vision of clarity, equaling power, is experienced by the poet, the poem as process ends. Every poet hopes that the mental and public audiences will join. An illogical, happy coincidence.