The stranger, wond’ring, stalks, and stares upon
Rome’s antique glories, in her ruins seen;
He sees high arches, huge shining heaps of stone,
Maim’d, mutil’d, murder’d, by years’ wasteful teen:
He sees a rugged, ragged, rocky quarr
Hang in the air, with ivy laced about.
O! what can last, alas! (then cries he out)
Sith Time hath conquer’d the world’s conqueror?
“One of the things that seems to impel me is it never made any sense to me to separate the genres so much. Ideally, I would move towards incorporating poetry into narrative. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t even move in and out of poetry. A lot of poets stick a lot of prose in their poems now. What holds the separation in place is, I think, money.“
Ronald Sukenick