Laurence Sterne

Digression is the 'sunshine' of reading Laurence Sterne wrote somewhere in The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, though just where it's written I may never know. I've never read my favorite book in the world straight through, though I've read all of it many,many times.

Sterne's the kind of writer who writes as if he's just woken up and can't wait to start thinking, or as if his thinking has started without him and he can't wait to catch up. The real weirdness of life is in every word he writes.

I don't read too much poetry these days, taking more and more books of poetry off the shelves and either putting them in cardboard boxes to take to the attic or to the bookstore at Fort Mason.

I've gotten over certain poets, unless they're personal friends and even then I'm more likely to get over their poetry sooner than I am over their friendship, at least I hope that's the way it will be.

How can you tell someone that his or her poems are much too much like poems and that he or she is not being themselves in them?

The world is filled with better people than I. Too bad it's also filled with so many people who are worse.