My ambition

I don’t want to read poetry and have to call it nice. Anything can be nice, a word so pallid and flabby it's only useful for irony or hostility. I want, I wish, I strive for poetry to lift me from my chair and plunge me into the shock and marvel of the moment. I want to surface from reading, wet and naked and alive, quick to the pulse of time and the earth and air crackling around and revelling inside me. That is how I want poetry to be.