I Began By Doing Book Reviews On

We Were All Born Of Flesh, In A Flare Of Pain. We Do Not Remember The Red Roots Whence We Rose, But We Know That We Rose And Walked, That After A While We Shall Lie Down Again.

The Truth--a Hideous Spectacle!

Oh, I've Discarded A Great Many [poems]. And Occasionally I've Discarded And Then Resurrected. I Would Find A Crumpled Yellow Ball Of Paper In The Wastebasket, In The Morning, And Open It To See What The Hell I'd Been Up To; And Occasionally It Was Something That Needed Only A Very Slight Change To Be Brought Off, Which I'd Missed The Day Before.

You Know, Without My Telling You, How Sometimes A Word Or Name Eludes You, And You Seek It Through Running Ghosts Of Shadow -- Leaping At It, Lying In Wait For It To Spring Upon It, Spreading Faint Snares For It Of Sense Or Sound: Until, Of A Sudden, As If In A Phantom Forest, You Hear It, See It Flash Among The Branches, And Scarcely Knowing How, Suddenly Have It.

I Think We've Come To A Kind Of Splinter Period In Poetry. These Tiny Little Bright Fragments Of Observation - And Not Produced Under Sufficient Pressure - Some Of It's Very Skillful, But I Don't Think There's Anywhere A Discernible Major Poet In The Process Of Emerging; Or If He Is, I Ain't Seen Him.