a long walk in the dark

I think that most poets labor joyously a long time to learn the language, to hear it, to speak it, to write it. It is also important to read poetry for me, to see how other men and women have used language during their time on earth. Beyond that process, which goes on all the time, there is simply a long walk in the dark - and the sweet electrical moment in which a fresh poem occurs. Though this may be the same poem that has occured through the ages. It may even be the same moment, friends.

- Larry Levis' "Coda: A Word to the Wicked", originally published in Rolling Stone in 1973, and republished posthumously in Levis' The Gazer Within.