I've got a new poem out this morning at Vox Populi--"How to Ask for Money"--a sample from the stream of poems that has been pouring out of me since midsummer. Many, perhaps most, of these poems are entire fictions: the I is not me, and the surface situation does not reflect my personal history.

I'll never be a novelist. I'll never write short stories. Poems like this one are as close as I'll get. And yet, as George Eliot reminds me, "I know no speck so troublesome as self."

Inventions are still a conversation with that troublesome me.