Montale

It's no fun waking up after drinking too much wine, it's the opposite of the feeling you were having when you were drinking the wine. But how were you to know you were drinking too much wine when all the signals at the time indicated you should drink more? 

Is there any other way to look at your own life other than to love it or want to change it so that it comes as close as possible to the life you hope to love? Some people don't think about their lives this way at all, they just live.

Reading Montale's incredible "Cuttlefish Bones", poems he wrote when he was 29. Cuttlefish is an remrkable sequence of admirably short lyric poems, translated from the Italian by William Arrowsmith. I didn't realize how remarkable the poems were when I first read them, years ago but years after Montale wrote them. I guess I wasn't ready for them. Now, one poem can get me through a whole day.

I don't know how people live without poetry. I had a drink with my old friend John Black last night in San Francisco. I gave him a book of poems just published by IF SF: Sam Haskins, Attorney, Poems 1970-1980. When I told him it was a new book, he said, "this isn't new, these are old poems." I told him that real poems never get old.

I spend more time than I should thinking about poems; I've done this for so long now that I'm afraid it's come to be my life. In a way, thinking about poems is my real life and I live in a world that's made up of what no one else knows about me.