“For the imagination thrives on ignorance and on the moist moral impress it takes from new pressures of experience. I am happiest when I have begun something, when I have pitched into that homely chaos of formal possibility, when I do not know where I am or where I am headed. It is a happiness like riding the subway after midnight. Anything can happen, and even if nothing does we will imagine some surprise or plot, a coincidence or ecstasy of patterns. In that zone of uncertainty, language feels like a treacherous ruin, and the task of making poetry, far from being a courtly or schoolish activity, seems one of elemental clarification, of dusting brittle vestiges of broken pots and bones in the hope of assembling something — history, fact, material, a feeling for what is just and beautiful — that might be made whole and true.” — W.S. Di Piero, from the title essay in Shooting the Works
