I Was Able To Read Poets That

The Name Of The Author Is The First To Go Followed Obediently By The Title, The Plot, The Heartbreaking Conclusion, The Entire Novel Which Suddenly Becomes One You Have Never Read, Never Even Heard Of, As If, One By One, The Memories You Used To Harbor Decided To Retire To The Southern Hemisphere Of The Brain, To A Little Fishing Village Where There Are No Phones.

The First Line Is The Dna Of The Poem; The Rest Of The Poem Is Constructed Out Of That First Line. A Lot Of It Has To Do With Tone Because Tone Is The Key Signature For The Poem. The Basis Of Trust For A Reader Used To Be Meter And End-rhyme.

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.

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.

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.