"Often I'll start poems by handwriting in a notebook, just mostly illegible nonsense, proto-notes, trying to latch on to one single 'fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery' (Keats) that I can move forward with. In this case I wrote down some lines, in a kind of distracted trance, and when I went back to them later, was quite surprised to realize they were a complete finished poem. That's only happened once or twice to me, so when I have that impression, I take it seriously, though it bothers my petit-bourgeois sense that something is only worthwhile if it has been 'worked on.' The title immediately came to me, I felt self-conscious about it, because it has a bit of a grandiose or summative quality, but it also seemed like the right balance between driftiness in the body of the poem and explicitness in the title. I guess I knew what I was writing about without knowing it, and the title just says it. The title plus poem felt personally inevitable, and out of my hands." —Matthew Zapruder