You'll Find I-poetry, You'll Find That You

I Hope The Poem, As It Goes On, Gets More Complicated, A Little More Demanding, A Little More Ambiguous Or Speculative, So That We're Drifting Away From The Casual Beginning Of The Poem Into Something A Little More Serious.

A Sentence Starts Out Like A Lone Traveler Heading Into A Blizzard At Midnight, Tilting Into The Wind, One Arm Shielding His Face, The Tails Of His Thin Coat Flapping Behind Him.

There Are Just Long Gaps Where I Can't Find A Point Of Insertion, I Can't Find A Good Opening Line, I Can't Find A Mood That I Want To Write Into. But Once I Do, Once A Line Falls Out Of The Air, Or I Get A Little Inkling Of A Subject And I Recognize That, It's Like The Sense That A Game Has Started.

As Soon As I Start To Write I'm Very Aware, I'm Trying To Be Aware That A Reader Just Might Well Pick Up This Poem, A Stranger. So When I'm Writing - And I Think That This Is Important For All Writers - I'm Trying To Be A Writer And A Reader Back And Forth. I Write Two Lines Or Three Lines. I Will Immediately Stop And Turn Into A Reader Instead Of A Writer, And I'll Read Those Lines As If I Had Never Seen Them Before And As If I Had Never Written Them.

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.