I'm Very Conscious Of The Fact That

And Strangely Enoughthe Only Emotion I Ever Feel, Is What The Beaver Must Feel, As He Bears Each Stick To His Hidden Construction, Which Creates The Tranquil Pond And Gives The Mallards Somewhere To Paddle, And The Pair Of Swans A Place To Conceal Their Young

In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.

I Find It Strange That - At Least In My Take On It - The People Who Are The Most Alarmed About The Dire Times We Live In Are The Ones Who Seem To Be Humorless, In Their Taste For Poetry Anyway. Humor Is Just An Ingredient. It's Always Been In Poetry. It Kind Of Dropped Out Of Poetry I Think During The 19th And Up To The Mid-twentieth Century. But It's Found Its Way Back. And It's Simply An Ingredient.

Poems Are Not Easy To Start, And They're Not Easy To Finish. There's A Great Pleasure In - I Wouldn't Say Ease, But Maybe Kind Of A Fascinated Ease That Accompanies The Actual Writing Of The Poem. I Find It Very Difficult To Get Started.

I Started Moving Away From Poets Like Wallace Stevens And Hart Crane And Started Reading Poets Like, Again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, And The British Poets Who Were Imported Through That Important Anthology Put Together By Alvarez - And Those Would Include Thom Gunn And Ted Hughes. And I Think These Poets Gave Me Assurance That There Were Other Ways To Write Besides The Rather Involuted Style Of High Modernism Whose High Priests Were Pound, Eliot And Stevens, And Crane Perhaps.