The Mind Can Be Trained To Relieve

When I Wrote I Took On The Role Of The Despondent And Difficult To Understand Person. Whereas In Life, I Was Easy To Understand, To The Point Of Being Simple-minded Maybe.

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.

You, Quote, Find Your Voice, Unquote, When You Are Able To Invent This One Character Who Resembles You, Obviously, And Probably Is More Like You Than Anyone Else On Earth, But Is Not The Equivalent To You.

This Love For Everyday Things, Part Natural From The Wide Eye Of Infancy, Part A Literary Calculation

I'm Very Conscious Of The Fact That Every Line Should Have A Cadence To It. It Should Contribute To The Progress Of The Poem. And That The Ending Of The Line Is A Way Of Turning The Reader's Attention Back Into The Interior Of The Poem.