I Think The Pleasure Of Form Is

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.

Often People, When They're Confronted With A Poem, It's Like Someone Who Keep Saying 'what Is The Meaning Of This? What Is The Meaning Of This?' And That Dulls Us To The Other Pleasures Poetry Offers.

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.

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.

In The Process Of Simplifying Oneself, One Often Discovers The Thing Called Voice.