THOMAS LYNCH

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Whatever's there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence.

... by doing you shall know What it is you have to do.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.