Editorial note: The excerpts below are from Michael Heller’s decades-long endeavor, “The Premises of Poetry.” They are drawn from Heller’s notes and entries from the 1980s through 2018. Heller describes the work as follows: “‘The Premises of Poetry,’ an ongoing project of prose and citation going back nearly fifty years, is derived from my notebooks and informal observations on readings in poetry, philosophy, history, and current affairs.”