Until Recently, I Thought 'occasional Poetry' Meant

I'm A Line-maker. I Think That's What Makes Poets Different From Prose-writers. That's The Main Way. We Think, Not Just In Sentences The Way Prose Writers Do But Also In Lines. So We're Doing These Two Things At The Same Time.

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.

Poems Are Not Easy To Start, And They're Not Easy To Finish. There's A Great Pleasure In - I Wouldn't Say Ease, But Maybe Kind Of A Fascinated Ease That Accompanies The Actual Writing Of The Poem. I Find It Very Difficult To Get Started.

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.

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.