“You die a thousand deaths in a private secret life, for no one knows what you do, what you love, and of course others are doing it, as with song, and you always hear this and die some more.  And you usually wind up converting the private life into some other form, a form which will allow the secret life to remain a secret, yet will still feed the new form.  With me it was writing.  The cost of the conversion was immense—it is twenty-five years later and I am only beginning to realize the cost, even as I write here, to it, for the first time. For the conversion calls for still another layer of identity which often (although, I agree, not always) obscures the real even more.  It is layer upon layer. Identity to one’s self, others, identity to one’s hat—my hat the writing hat, my arm the arm of memory—now I prefigure a drawing of a man whose arm is abstract, but active—and who has a hat for a head! And where is the heart?  A secret mark, breathing still, what a miracle!”

—Michael Burkard, from My Secret Boat: A Notebook of Prose and Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 1990)