Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation. |
My poetry changed when I was 15 years old. One of my uncles, Leo, had written poetry when he was a young man, and he took me down to the family business and he opened a safe and showed me some poems he'd written when he was 19. He also gave me a book of the collected poems of Shelley. And I still have that book. |
Of course, I like Byron enormously; I'm crazy about Don Juan. And of course Keats and Shelley and I suppose everyone that everyone likes. |
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. |
Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur. |
Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers. |
Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things. |
Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical, but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like. |
The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel. |
When I was 18 years old I had to go in the Army-it was World War II-and I didn't write very much at first, but when I was actually in combat in the Philippines I managed to write a few poems. It was reassuring to be able to write poems while I was in this terrible war. |
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut! |