Life Is A Loaded Gun That Looks

I Was Influenced By The Beats Because I Actually Just Began To Commit Adolescence Around 1955, When "howl" And Rebel Without A Cause And A Lot Of Other New Things Were Popping Up. (again I'm Trying To Give You A Finite Version Of This Career.) And Then I Came Under The Sway Of Wallace Stevens When I Was In College And Graduate School, And Basically Set As A Life Goal The Ambition Of Writing Third-rate Wallace Stevens. I Thought I Would Be Completely Content If I Was Recognized At Some Later Point In My Life As A Third-rate Wallace Stevens.

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.

Now I Would Say At Any Given Moment In American Life, There Are Probably 45 Poets In Airplanes Vectoring Across The Country Heading Towards...i Don't Know If Anyone's Reading It, But Poets Are Still Flying Around The Country Going From Lectern To Lectern.that Circuitry Has Become Very Well-established.

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 See The Progress Typical In Some Of My Poems As Starting With Something Simple And Moving Into Something More Demanding. This Is Certainly The Pattern Of Weird Poetry.