It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.
I wasn't going to be a college kid. The only subject I was interested in was English. I think I had a subconscious interest in analyzing story.
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