Poetry

turned out to be an invaluable mistress. Because poetry is form,
and the wooing and seduction of form is the whole game. You can
have all the apparatus in the world, but what you finally need is
something like a—I don’t know what—a lasso . . . a very delicate
thing, for catching wild deer. Oh, no, I’ll give you an analogy for
it. To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail
falling off. Did you know that? In India when I was a boy they had
great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their
tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who
could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He
had a special soft way of going up to them, and he’d bring them
back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can
give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.