to catch a green lizard without its tail falling off

Above Roy R. Behrens, book cover design for Joseph Langland, The Sacrifice Poems. Cedar Falls IA: North American Review, 1975.

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Lawrence Durrell, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer's Chapbook (NY: Viking Press, 1989), pp. 107-108—

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off. In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

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the transition from man to gluttonous mongoose

Poster, Roy R. Behrens © 2011

Edmund Gosse [describing the British poet Algernon Charles Swinburne]—

It was important, at meals, to keep the wine or beer or spirits out of Swinburne's reach. If this were not done, as often by host or hostesses not aware of his weakness, he would gradually fix his stare upon the bottle as if he wished to fascinate it, and then, in a moment, flash or pounce upon it, like a mongoose on a snake, drawing it towards him as though it resisted and had be to be struggled with. Then, if no one had the presence of mind to interfere, a tumbler was filled in a moment, and Swinburne had drained it to the last drop, sucking in the liquid with a sort of fiery gluttony, tilting the glass into his shaking lips, and violently opening and shutting his eyelids. It was an extraordinary sight, and one which never failed to fill me with alarm, for after that the Bacchic transition might come at any moment.