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. |
As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new. |
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry. |
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is. |
Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception. |
Here I was in my 20s, and life seemed to me so exciting and full of girls and gardens and steamships and drinks and tennis games and countries and cathedrals... I mean, it seemed absurd to be writing these drab, depressed little poems. I knew there were things like death and poverty and injustice, but they weren't everything. |
I also have travelled in Africa, so there are about seven or eight stories about Africa. I've also been to China, so there are five or six stories about China, and some about Mexico. I was a little surprised after I'd completed the book to see how many took place in other countries. |
I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal. |
I certainly think it's worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war. |
I discovered modern poetry I think quite late, when I was 17, through an anthology, a Louis Untermeyer anthology. Of course, I was crazy about modern poetry as soon as I discovered it. |
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. |
I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s. |
I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry. |
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet. |
I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I've done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a certain kind of magnet, writing prose picked up details that my poetry had never been able to pick up. |