"The reason we need to have our certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have." --Wendell Berry

"a genre now, verse about consciousness of war as a kind of weather..."
--Gerald Burns

It makes me very happy to talk about poetry (in these workshops) [1985], not because it is something i like, but because i never get to talk about anything that's real. And it seems, for every subject, you can only discuss its reality with those who are obsessed with it--everyone else being satisfied with vague opinions and careless attitudes (the air in the half-filled cereal box)--but not the reality of any other subject. This is an almost ideal state of ignorance...

What right is so precious as the right not to have to think?

In the twentieth century, the "right not to have to think" is tantamount to the right not to exist anymore as a species. Which is not something for an individual to decide. However, the moment approaches when enough individuals have tacitly agreed to this, and the mandate for collective suicide, as at Jonestown, will be enforced on majority and dissenters alike. Thus ends the earth's first experiment in nongenetic decision-making... Perhaps the moral to be drawn from it all, is that what is not code must needs be noise, in action. That, no lesser degree of order is sense.

Willed ignorance equals stupidity. But unearned sophistication also is a kind of willed innocence. Wanting to be, at the end instead of at the beginning, beyond learning.

"My soul, what's lighter than a feather? Wind.
Than wind? The fire. And what than fire? The mind.
What's lighter than a mind? A thought. Than thought?
This bubble world. What than this bubble? Nought."

--Francis Quarles