I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be

I Think More Influential Than Emily Dickinson Or Coleridge Or Wordsworth On My Imagination Were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies And Looney Tunes Cartoons.

...pleasure, Of Course, Is A Slippery Word.... Our Pleasures Ultimately Belong To Us, Not To The Pleasure's Source.

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.

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.

More Often Than Not In Poetry I Find Difficulty To Be Gratuitous And Show-offy And Camouflaging, Experimental To A Kind Of Insane Degree - A Difficulty Which Really Ignores The Possibility Of Having A Sensible Reader.