What I Want Is To Be Willing

What A View, I Said Again. The River Was Blank And Mindless With Beauty. It Was The Most Glorious Thing I Have Ever Seen. But It Was Not Seeing, Really. For Once It Was Not Just Seeing. It Was Beholding. I Beheld The River In Its Icy Pit Of Brightness, In Its Far-below Sound And Indifference, In Its Large Coil And Tiny Points And Flashes Of The Moon, In Its Long Sinuous Form, In Its Uncomprehending Consequence.

We've Always Had A Tradition In America Of Hounding Our Artists To Death. Look At The List Of Our Great Artists, You See A Continual History Of Defeat, Frustration, Poverty, Alcoholism, Drug Addiction. The Best Poets Of My Generation Are All Suicides.

The Body Is The One Thing You Can't Fake; It's Just Got To Be There.

So Much Destruction In Modern War Takes Place Miles And Miles Away From The Source Of The Destruction, The Human Being Who Has Caused It.

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.