You just want to sit back and watch the show. It's my job, you say, to make the poetry happen. Ah, yes . . . What I hope to offer you is a new, perhaps more intimate vantage point from up there. But from up close, words reveal themselves to be instead a trap door leading up from that tenebrous wizard's basement of the mind, that hazy, haunted place where scattered sensory ingredients are transmuted into a mental mapping of the world and its contents and workings.
Perception resides only in the fleeting moment of the present, that pinprick at the tip of the mind.
We're forced to grasp the world by groping through the vast, cluttered repositories of memory and knowledge that we've culled from it. But I'm actually writing about my memories of these things. This might seem a trivial distinction, but it actually makes my subject matter radically different in nature than I might first suppose. Places and events may be pretty concrete material, but my mental reconstitutions of these are a much slipperier affair. But for us the past has no empirical existence outside our own memories, and memory seems nothing like a set of pages gathered into an orderly volume.