Fuller: autobiography of poetry

When I started writing I started by writing poetry. I'd read Keats, I wanted to be that type of man. I was less impressed that he died so young, which everyone made such a big deal of, and more impressed that while he was alive all he seemed to do with his time was try to write poetry.

I wanted to get to the part of me that mattered, even if no one else could see it at the time. I knew that if I could do that, even try to do it, I'd be doing something very few men ever try to do with their lives. Not that I could do it of course, it's impossible to do it, that's the point of poetry, to try to get to the place with it where the impossible intersects with the possible and something new is made.

(That's largely the point Pascal was making by the way, by saying that all mankind's ills could be cured by man learning to sit alone in a room for one hour without restlessness--Pascal knew it was impossible to do but possible to try, and to try is what matters.)

Trying to live my life like this--to get at the part of me that mattered--everything had a chance to become a poem, even things that weren't made out of words. I learned to live with that part of me that was largely impossible to access, and to try to express what was there; even though I couldn't see it, taste it, feel it most if the time, I began to realize that the expression was almost all in the trying and that I'd just have to learn to live with incompletion and uncertainty.

Keats again: negative capability: not only the ability to make something out of a state of being that hovers between knowing and unknowing, but the ability to live in that state. Octavio Paz: poets oscillate between the religious temptation and the revolutionary temptation. Valery: poetry is a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.

I'm still trying to write a poem, even when I'm writing prose it's a poem I'm trying to write.