No one needs an explanation here for what happened. "It happened" is the explanation. No one here belongs to a race, an empire, a nation, only to this unmappable, landlocked, film-noir city situated in eternity. They live by night here. The time here is local time. The crime is local crime. The girl with the name she stole from her dead sister, the dead man in the lake know that things are forever the same. Sameness is their essence. Nothing here is sinister because nothing is at stake. Everything is null and void of depth, of resonance, not real but celluloid. Yesterday was yesterday, today is today, and no one cares why one becomes the other— no one but the private eye that is, the gumshoe, the bird dog standing in for us, our body double, our fedora- sporting, anachronistic, obsolete consciousness, who is always tortured by what he can't understand, who hires himself to investigate himself, who cooks his dinner for one and tries to think through what can't be thought through. The black wine is aerating. The pasta is limp and waiting to be sauced and tossed. There is a clue to find. There is an innocence to establish and an anguish in him he needs to destroy before it destroys him, an anguish so pure it almost feels like joy.
"I’d like to think that all of my books have reflected the life I was living when the poems were written. The poems in 'Red Stilts' are those of a man entering his 80s, a much different man than I was at 30, publishing my first collection, 'Official Entry Blank.' Those early poems are embarrassing to me now, but they represented who I was back then."
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"I have read a wide shelf’s worth of books of translation theory, but when I actually sit down to translate, especially poetry, all of that beautifully formulated theory goes out the window, and I am faced with the poet’s mind, and my mind, and how I am going to get them to work together."
