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Poetry is there, or it is not there, and either way my conscious will seems to have very little to do with it. If it is a calling, it is myself calling to myself, a ³mental necessity², as Eugene Ionesco says, which ultimately has very little to do with anything except the desire that it be actuated. I have come to believe that poetry is for me the expression of a _moral_ consciousness: not that poetry is about ³the good and the true², for poetry has never been about such things, but that it emerges from the fissures and fragmenting pressures of moral existence. As the ethicist Zygmunt Baumunt says, ³the primal fact of our being-the-the-world as, first a foremost, a moral choice, does not promise a happy-go-lucky, carefree life. On the contrary, it makes our predicament acutely uncomfortable...² I have always been acutely aware of this discomfort, and it has expressed itself in me through language: perhaps, as a profoundly inarticulate person, I had a great desire to articulate in language the ambiguities and contradictions I encountered and poetry, being language in a sense freed from itself, permitted me an arena where this could happen, allowed me to make an object of myself and so perhaps understand my being in the world a little better. For a poem isnıt me. But it is the process of making, not a final object, which matters to me. In the grip of those inexplicable impulses which always - and always unsatisfactorily - resolve into a poem, I feel that I could not do without it. There is no reason for me to write poetry, except that I want to; there are, rather, compelling reasons for me to stop. But I know itıs too late now. Alison