Writing Is Rewriting What You Have Rewritten.

All Families Had Their Special Christmas Food. Ours Was Called Dutch Bread, Made From A Dough Halfway Between Bread And Cake, Stuffed With Citron And Every Sort Of Nut From The Farm - Hazel, Black Walnut, Hickory, Butternut.

Every Christmas Should Begin With The Sound Of Bells, And When I Was A Child Mine Always Did. But They Were Sleigh Bells, Not Church Bells, For We Lived In A Part Of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Where There Were No Churches.

For My Oxford Degree, I Had To Translate French And German Philosophy (as It Turned Out, Descartes And Kant) At Sight Without A Dictionary. That Meant Germany For My First Summer Vacation, To Learn The Thorny Language On My Own.

All Poetry Is An Ordered Voice, One Which Tries To Tell You About A Vision In The Un-visionary Language Of Farm, City, And Love.

The Years Rolled Their Brutal Course Down The Hill Of Time. Still Poor, My Clothes Still Smelling Of The Horse Barn, Still Writing Those Doubtful Poems Where Too Much Emotion Clashed With Too Many Words.