I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.
One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.
Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.
The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.
