One Of These Days I'm-a Make Me

I Think A Good Poem Should Have Some Inscrutable Part. You Can't Quite Explain It. The Poem Can Only Explain Itself To A Certain Limit And At That Point You Enter Into A Little Bit Of Mystery. That For Me Is The Perfect Poem: To Begin In Clarity And To End In Mystery.

Part Of Writing Is Discovering The Rules Of The Game And Then Deciding Whether To Follow The Rules Or To Break Them. The Great Thing About The Game Of Poetry Is That It's Always Your Turn - I Guess That Goes Back To My Being An Only Child. So Once It's Under Way, There Is A Sense Of Flow.

When I'm Constructing A Poem, I'm Trying To Write One Good Line After Another. One Solid Line After Another. You Know A Lot Of The Lines - Some Hold Up Better As Lines Than Others. But I'm Not Thinking Of Just Writing A Paragraph And Then Chopping It Up.

Another Trouble With Poetry - And I'm Gonna Stop The List At Two - Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, The Sense You Get In A Poem That The Poet Takes For Granted An Interest On The Reader's Part In The Poet's Autobiographical Life, In The Poet's Memories, Problems, Difficulties And Even Minor Perceptions.

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.