Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As

I Think My Work Has To Do With A Sense That We Are Attempting, All The Time, To Create A Logical, Rational Path Through The Day. To The Left And Right There Are An Amazing Set Of Distractions That We Usually Can't Afford To Follow. But The Poet Is Willing To Stop Anywhere.

But Some Nights, I Must Tell You, I Go Down There After Everyone Has Fallen Asleep. I Swim Back And Forth In The Echoing Blackness. I Sing A Love Song As Well As I Can, Lost For A While In The Home Of The Rain.

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.

I See Woefully Obscure Poetry As Simply A Kind Of Verbal Rudeness.

All They Want To Do Is Tie The Poem To A Chair With A Rope And Torture A Confession Out Of It. They Begin Beating It With A Hose To Find Out What It Really Means.