That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things.

And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.