When You Get A Poem [in A

One Of The Ridiculous Aspects Of Being A Poet Is The Huge Gulf Between How Seriously We Take Ourselves And How Generally We Are Ignored By Everybody Else.

Particularly When I Thought Of Myself As A Wallace Stevens Acolyte, I Wrote Very Difficult Poetry And I Was Really Guilty Of Not Knowing What I Was Talking About. I Was Going For A Kind Of Clever Verbal Effect. I Was Trying To Sound Linguistically Or Verbally Interesting. I Had A Sense, I Guess, From Just Reading A Lot Of Poetry Of How A Poem Would Start And How It Would End But Really I Didn't Know What I Was Doing. It Had Very Little Connection To My Life.

You Come By Your Style By Learning What To Leave Out. At First You Tend To Overwrite—embellishment Instead Of Insight. You Either Continue To Write Puerile Bilge, Or You Change. In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.

A Motto I've Adopted Is, If At First You Don't Succeed, Hide All Evidence That You Ever Tried.

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.