A Paragraph by Skip Fox

One reason why I love getting new books from Skip Fox:

"To be a poet is to write poetry. That is, if your notion of poetry is sufficiently realized. How can we measure? Such notions might lie just beyond speech or miles without. Perhaps they can only be learned (not taught, though they seem so natural that only with difficulty can they be considered learned. Preparations? Preconditions? A lack of rigid predispositions as a setting for requisite attentiveness, definite interest in being alive (are you surprised how uncommon that is?), willingness to provisionally accept anything, disdain for predigested product, deepening respect for personal implication, desire to extend notions of beauty, to be real and at one's furthest application, and to be doing with the result resolve obtains, more than the residue of activity, and which involves you each time you consider it, a resolution aflame, association of sensibilities in passionate engagement, an issue or unfolding, simply, of more than time, opening rose, the genitals of soft freight an issuance, the color of her light and the timbre in her heels echoing down the parking garage, three floors below where she'll eventually find the body, and other things beside."

fr. Delta Blues
[Tokyo/Toronto: Ahadada Books, 2009]