August 23, 2012

On this night 46 years ago I wrote my first poem. The sheer process of creation has been pretty much as I imagined it even at that moment, though the meaning of such an enterprise in the world has been quite other than I had supposed.

Went downtown for a haircut, and ended up shopping like a madman. Shopped the way people do in the movies, hungrily, wanting to fill a gap that I hadn’t known was there. Bought, among other things, a beautiful glass paperweight with a scene in it of turtles on a log in a swamp. The effect might have been still greater had I sought out real turtles on a real log.

Good classes.