And I am a fool

(Some days it’s like this.)

It is hard to say

In the end

Time is the condition of delightfulness and of perishing both.

— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

APT No. 1, “Republic”



“... everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.”

—V.S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira

A difficult position

“I can’t quite accept what seems to be a fairly conventional notion of poetry as that which bolsters us up in what we already know. I am less interested in that than in poetry that puts us in a difficult position and makes us think about how things are.”

—Paul Muldoon, quoted in a review of Maggot by Nick Laird, in The New York Review of Books, 23 June, 2011.