“The foregrounding of artifice—dwelling on the making of the poem, in a poem—seems to go to the core of what poetry is, doesn’t it? That it offers a place in language where we don’t forget that we’re using language?”

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body. 
That q That was my first bit of early morning typing 
So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right.

“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s original release, Robert Hass revisits Gary Snyder’s ‘The Practice of the Wild.’

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red brown seeds beaded