Best Epistles

"What is poetry which does not save/ Nations or people?/ A connivance with official lies,/ A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment... They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds/ To feed thee dead who would come disguised as birds./ I put this book here for you, who once lived/ So that you should visit us no more."

"My own past/ Could subject you to guilt by association:/ If you write anything more than false checks,/ Abandon all hope of large press publication... Whoever steals my purse/ Helps chain me to my writing desk again/ For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse:/ May your pen name help send you to your pen."

"Dear Lorca,/ These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent... I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep-- and my dreams/ will be in prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry./ You are dead and the dead are very patient."

"Goodbye,/ you who are, for me, the postmarks again/ of imaginary towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell--/ their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept."

"Dear Doctor, I have read your play,/ Which is a good one in its way,/ Purges the eyes, and moves the bowels,/ And drenches handkerchiefs like towels/ With tears that in a flux of grief,/ Afford hysterical relief/ To shatter'd nerves and quicken'd pulses,/ Which your catastrophe convulses."