However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.
People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.
All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thump. And that's not the only reason.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
I just didn't want to shoot other people.
Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.
But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
