To Be Precise And Reckless: That Is

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.

You Are Bound, My Hunch Is, To Make It Just Fine.

Then You Develop A Kind Of Critical Sense About What You Write. You Can Tell When Something Is Good, But It Would Be Just As Good In Somebody Else's Work Too. You Want To Hold Out For Those Things Only You Can Say.

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.

A Poet Is Someone Who Stands Outside In The Rain Hoping To Be Struck By Lightning.