I read a passage from something I’d written earlier. I don’t push forward without looking back. It seems to me that all of my writing is really one long sentence, one theme with several variations, one something to say, and my career is saying as much of that string of words as I can before I die.
I don’t think there is such a thing as finding it. Finding the Truth, once and for all. For me there is the occasional and graceful stumbling onto the Great Secret, which is like a music or like a tapestry—or maybe both of those things are like It. It swirls and it swirls, encompasses all and does not explain all. No explanation is. All there is—is something like peace. Or maybe peace is like it. And then you pass out of it. And in all your work, in all your life and your loving you remember it. You carry a seed of it. For me loving and writing are like that.
When I was nineteen I sat in a Pizza Hut with a friend. She was twenty-three. Beyond the Roseland Welcomes You sign, I saw the university of Notre Dame and a green field. I said, “I will tell stories about this place. I will tell stories about the Midwest. I will write about people who didn’t think they were worth writing about.
No matter what I said about the Pentet, about moving on to write about other places—and I shall—I will not forsake this green corn, this black earth, the silver-blue-green water. A poet needs a home, needs a land under his feet that he draws strength from. This is mine.
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