catching wild deer

"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 dont' 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."

- Lawrence Durrell

from an interview in The Paris Review

Issue 22, Autumn-Winter 1959-1960