A Writer's Ruminations

"A poet worth reading lives in the present, which keeps changing continuously into something else. What worked yesterday in poetry won’t work today, so a poet has no choice but to find means to confront the times he lives in. What doesn’t change, however, is that we are still what we were centuries ago, minds reading themselves for clues to the meaning of their existence, astonished now and then to be alive, while being acutely aware of their own mortality."

— Charles Simic, “Poetry and Utopia”