Some can gaze and not be sick,
But I could never. learn the trick.
There’s this to say for blood and breath,
They give a man a taste for death.
“I am trying to discover things that I am not already conscious of. Rather than deal with experiences from my past which are already familiar to me, the excitement of writing poetry for me is to explore places that I have not already found. Heidegger says that to write a poem is to make a voyage of discovery. In the same way, I am always interested in my future poems rather than the ones which I’ve already written. The old ones really don’t do anything for me.”
John Ashbery