if it’s going to leave your mind it’s probably not worth keeping anyway.

Muldoon interview


One of the risks is that one allows the poem to begin, as it were, too soon. The point at which the poem should really begin is often where, in some other intellection, it might have ended. I never, for example, save my “big” ideas for down the road. I start with the big idea and see how much further I can go.

One of the reasons why the sonnet has been such an enduring form is that it really is true to a way of thinking, within which one’s capable of doing an awful lot. Here we have A, by contrast with which we have B. That double whammy of the sonnet is integral to us. But one of the great dangers is of stopping the poem too soon. Of saying a much lesser thing, managing a much lesser revelation than it might otherwise.