Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
