William Packard Surely Must Be One Of

I Think Ginsberg Has Done More Harm To The Craft That I Honor And Live By Than Anybody Else By Reducing It To A Kind Of Mean That Enables The Most Dubious Practitioners To Claim They Are Poets Because They Think, If The Kind Of Thing Ginsberg Does Is Poetry, I Can Do That.

It Takes An Awful Lot Of Time For Me To Write Anything. I Have Endless Drafts, One After Another; And I Try Out 50, 75, Or A Hundred Variations On A Single Line Sometimes. I Work On The Process Of Refining Low-grade Ore. I Get Maybe A Couple Of Nu Ggets Of Gold Out Of 50 Tons Of Dirt. It Is Tough For Me. No, I Am Not Inspired.

Detachment Produces A Peculiar State Of Mind. Maybe That's The Worst Sentence Of All, To Be Deprived Of Feeling What A Human Being Ought To Be Entitled To Feel.

To Say That Its Wrong To Feel This Way Is Not The Point; You Do Feel It. All You See Is A Flash Of Fire And, Depending On Your Altitude, You Don't Even See That Sometimes.

William Packard Surely Must Be One Of The Great Editors Of Our Time.