The poet should be a dark barker before the tents of existence. Poetry is what can be heard at manholes echoing up Dante's fire escape. The poet must have wide-angle vision, each look a worldglance, and the concrete is most poetic. Poetry is not all heroin, horses, and Rimbaud. It is also the whisper of elephants and the powerless prayers of airline passengers fastening their seatbelts for the final descent.
Poetry is the real subject of great prose.
Each poem should be a momentary madness, and the unreal is realist. Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained. A poem is its own Coney Island of the mind, its own circus of the soul, its own Far Rockaway of the heart. Poetry should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown.