Good Writing Gives Energy, Whatever It Is

I've Been An Inveterate Reader Of Literary Magazines Since I Was A Teenager. There Are Always Discoveries. You're Sitting In Your Easy Chair, Reading; You Realize You've Read A Story Or A Group Of Poems Four Times, And You Know, Yes, I Want To Go Farther With This Writer.

Of The Individual Poems, Some Are More Lyric And Some Are More Descriptive Or Narrative. Each Poem Is Fixed In A Moment. All Those Moments Written Or Read Together Take On The Movement And Architecture Of A Narrative.

Poetry Dovetails Contradictions.

We Sometimes Received - And I Would Read - 200 Manuscripts A Week. Some Of Them Were Wonderful, Some Were Terrible; Most Were Mediocre. It Was Like The Gifts Of The Good And Bad Fairies.

Poetry Seems To Have Been Eliminated As A Literary Genre, And Installed Instead, As A Kind Of Spiritual Aerobic Exercise - Nobody Need Read It, But Anybody Can Do It.