All I Wanted Was To Be A

Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As A Wallace Stevens Acolyte, I Wrote Very Difficult Poetry And I Was Really Guilty Of Not Knowing What I Was Talking About. I Was Going For A Kind Of Clever Verbal Effect. I Was Trying To Sound Linguistically Or Verbally Interesting. I Had A Sense, I Guess, From Just Reading A Lot Of Poetry Of How A Poem Would Start And How It Would End But Really I Didn't Know What I Was Doing. It Had Very Little Connection To My Life.

Poetry Is My Cheap Means Of Transportation, By The End Of The Poem The Reader Should Be In A Different Place From Where He Started. I Would Like Him To Be Slightly Disoriented At The End, Like I Drove Him Outside Of Town At Night And Dropped Him Off In A Cornfield.

I Always Think W.s. Merwin's Poems Will Last Of Anyone Writing Today. If I Had To Bet On Posterity I Would Bet Merwin. My Poems Could Easily Evaporate. So I Don't Know. If You Find Yourself As A Writer Thinking About Posterity You Should Probably Go Out For A Brisk Walk Or Something.

You Will Always Be The Bread And The Knife, Not To Mention The Crystal Goblet And—somehow—the Wine.

To Write Poetry Is To Be Very Alone, But You Always Have The Company Of Your Influences. But You Also Have The Company Of The Form Itself, Which Has A Kind Of Consciousness. I Mean, The Sonnet Will Simply Tell You, That's Too Many Syllables Or That's Too Many Lines Or That's The Wrong Place. So, Instead Of Being Alone, You're In Dialogue With The Form.