Used Bookstores

While I was in Baltimore, Brian used the Google to find used bookstores and came across this great store called Normals. It's packed to bursting with used books and LPS. Great prices, too. There was a lot of stuff there I wanted, but I reined myself in and bought just a few things. For Love is the first one I've cracked. I started it just before bed last night. I love the preface and thought I'd post it here. It speaks to a lot of the things I've been thinking about lately.

Wherever it is one stumbles (to get to wherever) at least some way will exist, so to speak, as and when a man takes this or that step—for which, god bless him. Insofar as these poems are such places, always they were ones stumbled into: warmth for a night perhaps, the misdirected intention come right; and too, a sudden instance of love, and the being loved, wherewith a man also contrives a world (of his own mind).

It seems to me, now, that I know less of these poems than will a reader, at least the reader for whom—if I write for anyone—I have written. How much I should like to please! It is a constant concern.

That is, however, hopeful and pompous, and not altogether true. I write poems because it pleases me, very much—I think that is true. In any case, we live as we can, each day another—there is no use in counting. Nor more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it, me.