Pastoral Resources

I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.