A Terrible Thing About Getting Oldish Is

All Those Authors There, Most Of Whom Of Course I've Never Met. That's The Poetry Side, That's The Prose Side, That's The Fishing And Miscellaneous Behind Me. You Get An Affection For Books That You've Enjoyed.

It's Like Breathing In And Out To Me. It's Like Having A Conversation With Someone Who Isn't There. Because It Has To Be Addressed To Somebody - Not A Particular Person, Or Very Rarely.

In Fact A Lot Of Them I Think Are Absolute Baloney. Those Charles Olsens And People Like That. At First I Was Interested In Seeing What They Were Up To, What They Were Doing, Why They Were Doing It. They Never Moved Me In The Way That One Is Moved By True Poetry.

However, I Learned Something. I Thought That If The Young Person, The Student, Has Poetry In Him Or Her, To Offer Them Help Is Like Offering A Propeller To A Bird.

All I Write About Is What's Happened To Me And To People I Know, And The Better I Know Them, The More Likely They Are To Be Written About.