To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Another way of saying put it in the Book would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.

Similar but not the same - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.

That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

With poets dead and gone as Keats says in Mermaid Tavern they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.