“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.”
When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is far off as ever, but so Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod (Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)... Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle between Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse) The unbeatable slow machine That brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasis Of havings-to, fear, faces. Days sift down it constantly. Years. --The Life with the Hole in It
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“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.”
“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”
“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
“I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”
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