Some Personal Notes

          the search for form and meaning

          One of those questions which keeps coming up in the awkward "discussion periods" after readings--
          such as, "Do you type or write your manuscripts in long hand?" or "Do you keep a regular writing
          schedule?"-- is, "How did you get started writing poetry?"  I've thought about this--and the answer
          may contain points with which others can identify.

          Both my grandfather and father were amateur poets; my grandfather had a collection of poems about
          his family privately printed in a soft, imitation leather binding, and a number of my father's poems were
          printed in Oklahoma newspapers. Both were rough, masculine men with streaks of tenderness and
          weakness which caused both to drink too much and also to write poetry. Most of what my father
          wrote was dialect verse, influenced by James Whitcomb Riley and Edgar Guest; it was humorous,
          vivid, and technically competent. It was not unusual for him to come home from work excited, with
          a new manuscript in his hand--and that sand-colored volume of my grandfather's was always around
          the house, a reminder that real men wrote poems about the people and things they cared about.

          My aunts on my father's side--three young women during my formative years--loved to read poetry
          to me and to persuade me to memorize it. I remember especially Poe's The Raven, another soft
          leather pamphlet around the house, with eerie illustrations. My aunts read it aloud to me with ghostly
          drama in their voices. Riley's "The Raggedy Man," and "Little Orphant Annie," Field's "Wynken,
          Blynken, and Nod," "Little Boy Blue," and, especially, "Jest 'Fore Christmas," and most of Stevenson's
          A Child's Garden of Verses were deeply implanted in my mind at an early age--along with, of course,
          the Mother Goose rhymes and other familiar, anonymous verses that are part of the culture of childhood.
          As I remember, relatives were always asking me to recite poetry--so I must have come early to associate
          it with attention and applause.

          Those memories of pleasant associations with poetry end about the time I began school--except for
          the continued influence of my father. Some little poems I wrote during my first years in school turned
          up in my papers--very conventional, rhymed, sentimental poems, but I remember almost nothing
          pertaining to poetry which stirred my imagination or deepened my commitment. Our school system
          seems designed to curtail and stifle individuality and creativity. I attended various elementary schools
          in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Houston and grew increasingly alienated from poetry, literature and
          reading itself, although I remember the delicious reading of summer vacation--time stolen from the
          system--when with almost the excitement of crime I wallowed through such fat novels as Ben Hur and
          A Tale of Two Cities. In high school in Houston I began writing stories and developed an interest in
          journalism, putting out a little neighborhood newspaper in summer months. If I read poetry at all it was
          in the context of grinding out assignments for effusive lady teachers who tried to persuade us of the
          morals poetry contained and seemed oblivious to its power and beauty.

          As a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, sixteen years old, something again awakened my interest
          in poetry. I wrote one little poem and submitted it to a poetry magazine called Red Earth--and to my
          surprise it was accepted and published. I remember how it started:

                         A finger on the window pane
                         Sketches in rime that follows rain
                         The idle thoughts of a youthful brain.

          I remember being very proud of that word rime, used as a pun, and on working the word ephemeral
          (which I had just learned) into the poem. Poetry was unfortunately all mixed up in my mind with
          vocabulary expansion.

          One of my professors there had an elegant Harvard accent which I much admired and a poem published
          in a soft-cover pamphlet which I admired even more. Not until working on this book did I make the
          connection between that poem and the leather-bound pamphlet of my grandfather's. Here again was a
          man in flesh-and-blood with a family and apparently normal habits, who wrote and published poetry.
          Consciously or unconsciously we shape much of our lives on living models, and I was lucky to have had
          a chance to associate with a few men who were unashamed to let poetry be a precious and natural part
          of their being.

          When, at eighteen, I was drafted, I had a month at home of suspended animation between the time I
          dropped out of college and actually reported for duty. It was a natural time for reflection--and much
          of my reflection took poetic form. I had no technique. I arranged words around the paper in what
          might be called experimental ways--though it might be more accurate to say I was looking for a form
          to contain me. Similarly the poetry I wrote during my year on Okinawa stretched, contorted, shrank,
          chopped, screamed, whispered, and talked, but rarely sang, as I tried long lines, short lines, rhythm
          and nonrhythm, typographical tricks, designs, and what have you--all palette work to discover what
          the medium of poetry was capable of.

          I believe that such experimentalism is especially characteristic of that period of a poet's life before he
          knows what he wants to say. Good poets are continuously experimenting with form, continuously
          learning and adapting their forms to what they have to say. But when the manipulation of the way the
          poem appears on the page completely dominates the poem and obscures its content, this is a symptom
          of confused purpose, confused mission. When a poet finds himself, when he comes to care passionately
          about what he is saying, when he feels his content is urgent and must not be blurred or damaged on its
          way to a reader's mind and heart, his experimentalism with form becomes much subtler. He does not
          want the noise of innovation to muffle the music of his intent.

          But I was not even aware of such problems while I was in the army. When I was discharged in
          November, 1946, I began falling in love and found that a great stimulus. I settled into a fairly stable
          style, Eliotian in flavor, erotic in content--and I still hadn't the least idea what I was doing in terms of
          form except that I tended to keep the lines on the page of rather even length. I fled the Southwest
          for Chicago, fell in love with a suitable audience for my poems (she has continued to function well in
          that respect during more than thirty years of marriage), and kept playing with line length, punctuation,
          capitalization, surrealistic imagery, jumbled syntax, graphic design, as I poured out variations on the
          theme of "I love you." Some of these I sent back to my former professor, who noted that I must have
          been reading a lot of Eliot, and who asked me what was perhaps the most shaking question I had tried
          to deal with up to that time (at least in regard to poetry): "How do you decide where a line should be
          divided?"

          I didn't know. My experimentation had been a wild effort to dodge the question entirely. About the
          same time I took a poetry course at the University of Chicago with J. V. Cunningham, who asked
          even more hard-headed questions. If the word poetry referred to anything other than metrical writing,
          he had to be convinced. My form of rebellion against what seemed to be an excessively narrow view
          was to prove to him that I could write in tight forms if I chose to do so--and I began churning out
          rhymed iambic pentameter, even sonnets. And, strangely, I liked the experience. For the first time I
          could put the question of form out of my mind to a large extent, accepting a norm of iambic verse with
          a limited and recognized range of variations, and I could turn my serious attention to what I was saying.

          I will give you a couple of samples of poetry from that period. Here is the first stanza of a long poem
          I wrote to my Spanish professor, entitled Insomniac River:

                         Deeply the water worries flinty knots
                         that rise like bad springs in its bed
                         and turn the troubled surface where it lies
                         reflecting garbled vision of the skies.

          The pun in the second line relects an enthusiasm for the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and
          others. Overall, the poem is thick with words and intellectuality. It is literary in the worst sense--and
          that is where I was at about age 21, in graduate school, studying the New Criticism. At the same
          time I hit upon a theme with deep personal meaning for me, one which I thought must have deep
          personal significance for others. Under the silt of the insomniac river was a clear cold current of
          conviction, a drive for perfection--which ultimately is a drive for death--"to find where seas their
          absolutes unfold."

          The same theme emerges in a poem I wrote for Prof. Cunningham's poetry class (and which was
          eventually published in Epos and picked up in two anthologies):

                                  MY DOUBT RANGED FREE

                         My doubt upon the land ranged free; it fed
                         where others trusted and believed: a child
                         for lunch, a test tube, home and church were piled
                         upon its dinner plate alive and dead;
                         for all was sham except my love and me.

                         The land was bare; my doubt was fat with pride,
                         and, ardent beast, it purred at my delight;
                         but fond of praise and whetted, vain of might,
                         it looked again; it was not satisfied
                         until it turned, consumed my love and me.

          Again it was the problem of belief. Education seemed the education of doubt, but skepticism was a
          corrosive force, a universal solvent--and the problem with a universal solvent is that there is nothing
          to keep it in. As a term paper for a Melville course I turned in a long blank verse poem called
          "Ishmael to Ahab." In it, Ishmael is speaking from his wallowing coffin on which he floated alone,
          after the sinking of the Pequod, to the drowned, fanatic captain who had led the mad voyage of
          revenge. Ishmael finds himself jealous of dead Ahab for the latter's capacity for belief. The poem
          concludes:

                         Asea in comprehension, I have none:
                         no creed of love or hate on which to build;
                         a moment's thought, and schools of Moby Dicks,
                         and Christs and countries, mistresses of mind,
                         suddenly naught.
                                                   Could I resign my rightness
                         and my strength to gods to whom they are
                         not worth the taking, or, like Ahab, thrust
                         my spear in any clear contention, then
                         lose scope, be damned to narrow ignorance,
                         in the closed world believe a fragment of truth,
                         fragment of nonsense, could I but do this . . . .
                         did I not comprehend my very wish . . . .
                         the glory of my chase would soon obscure
                         the failure of my voyage; no one fails
                         who, numb to truth, pursues to the last lowering,
                         and, dying, can mistake his own blood spouting
                         for the whale's.
                                                 Now casual scud clouds
                         ride low before the wind, besmudged and tattered,
                         helpless they sail, and fail to fill the sky.
                         My coffin has no keel; by a dumb gull,
                         hiding his legs, crossing the moon, am I
                         mocked, with now foot and now skull at the bow.

          After my period of confinement in rhymed, rather strict iambic verse, this venture into unrhymed
          pentameter seemed like a convalescent's uncertain first walk in the open air. Notice how closely
          the texture of this passage is woven with alliteration and internal rhyme--a kind of security I needed
          while working in the scary open spaces of lines without end rhyme. I remember being very proud
          of the variations in the last line:

           MOCKED, with| now FOOT| and now| SKULL at| the BOW.|

          The line seems to sway like the coffin on the open sea, the trochees in the first and fourth feet jerking
          it about like the directionless turning of the floating man. In the preceding lines the gull flaps along on
          a sure course, the rhythm conveying the lazy evenness of his wing beats:

           HID ing| his LEGS| CROS sing| the MOON,| am I|

          For the next couple of years after getting my M.A. from Chicago, while working for a doctorate at
          Ohio State, I wrote very little poetry, but in the course of my study I did a great deal of intense
          analysis of poetic form, particularly of Shakespeare's verse, metaphysical poetry, and the heroic
          couplet tradition of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I scanned reams of Milton,
          Cowley, Herrick, Donne, Herbert, Dryden, and Pope. Until I felt I understood what metrical principles
          underlay a poet's practice, I felt I did not understand his poetry. What little poetry I wrote myself was
          excessively tight, bottled in short lines, strict meter and exact rhymes. Somehow getting out of graduate
          school was liberating, and when I started teaching at Antioch College in 1953 I simultaneously began
          writing in a wilder manner, though I rarely sank into free verse.

          Never, in all this time, had I regarded myself as a poet. Sometimes I thought of myself as a writer who
          taught; more often as a teacher who sometimes wrote poetry. At what point does one earn the right to
          say of oneself "I am a poet?" Perhaps never--but I can pinpoint the time when, whether justified or not,
          I so began to regard myself.

          One evening when I felt like relaxing from my dissertation, I went to my basement study and started
          writing sonnets. I wrote four of them between eight and midnight, all based on boyhood experiences
          in the Kiamichi Mountains of Oklahoma. I was a little giddy with my facility, but had no notion whether
          I should take the sonnets seriously as more than exercises. I sent them, presumptuously, to Poetry,
          and within a month one was accepted, appearing in their May, 1955, issue:

                                          DEER HUNT

                         Because the warden is a cousin, my
                         mountain friends hunt in summer when the deer
                         cherish each rattler-ridden spring, and I
                         have waited hours by a pool in fear
                         that manhood would require I shoot or that
                         the steady drip of the hill would dull my ear
                         to a snake whispering near the log I sat
                         upon, and listened to the yelping cheer
                         of dogs and men resounding ridge to ridge.
                         I flinched at every lonely rifle crack,
                         my knuckles whitening where I gripped the edge
                         of age and clung, like retching, sinking back,
                         then gripping once again the monstrous gun--
                         since I, to be a man, had taken one.

          When I received that acceptance I said jokingly to a friend, "Well, if I'm going to be published in
          Poetry, I guess I'm a poet." And I must have believed it, for from that time forward I began
          writing more regularly, submitting more, and adjusting my psyche and my life to a new identity.
          The other three Kiamichi sonnets were soon also accepted by magazines. Most of the poetry
          I was writing was getting accepted--and my name began to stare back at me from dozens of little
          magazines and some of the big ones. In fact, I began to be embarrassed by some of the poems
          appearing in print, as my own values about poetry were shifting rapidly.

          In 1955, when my poetry began appearing in magazines, I was 28--and more naive, and cockier,
          than I had any right to be. I was to learn that it was altogether too easy to get poetry published, to
          be a poet in that superficial sense--and that this enables one to dodge the real question of whether
          his work is truly good, of whether he is a poet in any enduring way.

          From this brief account I think I can deduce several operating principles which might apply to the
          experience of others. I saw early that poetry was a way of getting attention and affection. It was
          something one could do with his familiar and casual experience--besides forgetting it. It was something
          men do--if not a career, at least a respected avocation. As I became more sophisticated I began to
          see literature as the core of human culture. Writing about one's own life and thoughts was a way of
          preserving the ephemeral and enhancing (or discovering) its significance. Similarly, it served that
          function for mankind as a whole. Growing up meant reading and being grown-up meant writing--
          contributing to the life stream. Poetry differed from other kinds of writing in its greater emphasis
          upon form. Understanding it meant in large part understanding the form.

          I can imagine mathematics having exactly the same kind of function in a young person's life. He comes
          to see that underlying all experience are certain abstractions of quantity and relationship, that process
          can exist and be exciting independent of any particular content. Being a person, participating in humanity,
          understanding life--all are determined by the mathematical (i.e., logical) skeleton underlying experience.
          One is impelled not only to learn and use the underlying principles, but to make some personal contribution.
          Thus he pays his dues and belongs to the human race.

          For me literature, and particularly poetry, came to have that almost religious function. It was the
          substratum of earthly change. It contained the mysteries. It contained the keys. Life is something to be
          written about. To live is to write about it. I can remember, in my twenties, thinking that writing must
          surely be the only source of commitment and meaning. I thought that everyone, willy-nilly, was either a
          writer or a frustrated writer. I can remember, at thirty or so, turning an intellectual corner, new green
          fields opening up before my eyes, when I discovered that writing was for life, not life for writing.

           the use of experience

          There is something almost chilling about the way writers are willing to use intimate material of their
          lives for their work. A poet's personal experience is, of course, all he has to work with. But that
          experience is like lumber stacked in the barn, with the new and second-hand boards all mixed
          together. Some may still have old nails in them. Some have been sawed crookedly. Much of it comes
          from old structures now dismantled. It is important that when the poet goes to build something he not
          moon over the lumber's original use or worry about the trees from which it came. The present work
          has present demands. If the poet does not find at hand what he needs, he has to make it up or go out
          and get it. In the finished product it will be impossible or difficult to recognize where all the pieces
          came from; but if one can recognize them, and makes a point of doing so, this will only interfere with
          proper appreciation of the new creation.

          Let me illustrate by a discussion of the relationship of a poem to the facts of my life. Some years ago
          my wife, Marty, was in the hospital, coming out of anesthesia after a complex operation on the bones of
          her foot. Recuperation from bone operations is a particularly painful experience, and as she drifted to
          consciousness she suffered wracking agony for incoherent spells, and then fell back into unconsciousness.
          It was important that someone--that I--be right there beside her bed to comfort her during those moments
          of fitful waking. But most of the time she was asleep.

          But what was I doing while she was sleeping? Sometimes I read--but I found it hard to concentrate
          on reading. Sometimes I simply rode the reverie of my mind--but that was a fruitless and frustrating
          indulgence. Well, I thought, I'll write a poem. How could I write a poem under those circumstances?
          I found the forced effort of concentration was actually a relief from random musing and random feeling.
          Was I heartless? Maybe. I decided to write a poem about that very phenomenon. It came out as a sonnet:

                                          COLD BLOOD

                         Magic is skill. Plunge here in my bare chest
                         or anywhere. Although you puncture skin,
                         find gristle, ribs, your blade will never nick
                         my heart (which like an old frog knows the best
                         endurance, croaking lamentation or
                         laughter, remaining unobserved). Once
                         a nimbler, dumb heart hopped in young response;
                         a touch could scratch it. Never saber more
                         shall find it out. My heart has learned to think--
                         and though I bristle with blades the wise one squats
                         in a corner, pumping, not in terror but
                         wary and knobby, its belly chilly pink,
                         its eyes like seeds, its great mouth tight and tragic.
                         All hear, none see or feel it. Skill is magic.

          As I remember the original, there was a reference to my father in lines 8 and 9, in place of "Never
          saber more/shall find it out." The poem said, not very clearly, that it was the injury to my heart
          rendered by my father which caused my heart to wise up. I took that out because I hadn't said it very
          well--and I wasn't sure it was true: it was too simplistic an explanation (and perhaps too self-pitying).
          As revised, the poem gives no explanation except natural maturation for the heart's learning to think.

          What is the material for that poem? The situation in the hospital is never mentioned, but it was, in
          fact, the poem's chief instigation and provided its theme. How can one deliberately, in cold blood, sit
          beside his suffering wife and write a poem--a sonnet, no less? Is it inspiration? Is it magic? No: I had
          learned at an early age that the magician was a trickster. I remember going to see Blackstone the Magician
          at a theater in Houston--and from the angle of my view on the first row I could see "behind" a number of
          his tricks. Besides, he told us himself that there was no such thing as magic. Children are harder to fool
          than adults, he said, because when he pointed across the stage an adult would look where he was pointing,
          but a child was likely to look at his pointing hand. For some reason, this discovery was not disillusioning
          for me but exciting. There was no Santa Claus. Events had explanations. Reason and skill made the world
          accessible to me, whereas I could never hope to participate in a mysterious and supernatural world unless
          God began whispering in my ear--which He did not seem likely to do.

          Magic is skill. Blackstone or some other magician put the girl into the box and shoved in saber after
          saber--then opened the lid and showed us how the clever and limber girl was twisted around the blades
          like a boneless doll. Need one be heartless to write a poem in a recovery room of a hospital? No: but
          he'd better have his heart under control. Drive what sabers you please through my chest, the limber heart
          will contort itself around them.

          In searching for an image for the heart itself I thought of a fat old bullfrog such as I used to hear croaking
          through the night when I camped in the Kiamichi Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. You could tell by the
          size of the croak that he must be a monster, but if you went looking with a flashlight you would probably
          never find him. I remember sloshing along the black creeks, little frogs arcing through the flashlight beam
          right and left, only rarely finding the big ones that made the most noise, bafflingly near, immobile, invisible.
          The image of the magician putting swords through a box with a girl in it fused with that of searching the
          night for a bullfrog. Also, I remember that I had been told that children were to be seen but not heard.
          As a man, particulary as a poet, I preferred to be heard but not seen, like the bullfrog. If my heart was
          truly to croak its lamentation or laughter, it needed some survival tactics. It had to remain unobserved.
          It had to learn how to think.

          But an element was still missing if I wanted the poem to be true to experience. That responsive, "nimbler,
          dumb heart" of youth participated in a world which reason could never comprehend and contain. In his
          secure isolation the old frog comes upon a lonely and tragic truth. Paradoxically, the very wisdom which
          enables him to survive in the world cuts him off from its essential spirit.

          It is, after all, cold-blooded to be able to write that poem under those circumstances. Could I be with
          Marty in her suffering, feeling what she was feeling, writing the poem would be as unthinkable for me as it
          was for her in her burning twilight of consciousness. I would be more miserable, perhaps, but neither of
          us would be so lonely in our experience. My presence there was itself an effort to combat that loneliness.

          As I remembered the bullfrogs I had seen--their cold eyes intent and fearful, their wide mouths clamped,
          their soft throats pulsing--I thought of a pathetic, puppet, tragic mask. So it was you making all the noise
          in the night. Only you. I was back into the child's world from which Blackstone had delivered me. The
          universe is at least paradoxical. Nature is supernatural. Mystery does after all haunt our darkness. Even
          the awesome skill of the magician is ultimately inexplicable. Skill is magic.

          That is the kind of thinking that went on as I sat there, interrupted by Marty's moans from time to time.
          I want to tell one other anecdote about that poem. John Ciardi had recently taken over the job as poetry
          editor of Saturday Review, and in his initial editorial statement he said, in effect, that if any sonnets were
          thereafter accepted for that magazine it would be over his dead body. I had not published much poetry
          anywhere and none in Saturday Review, and I did not know John Ciardi, but I took that statement as
          a kind of personal challenge. I sent him half-a-dozen sonnets in a row, and finally he accepted "Cold
          Blood," the first of many poems he was to accept. Was it the poem's magic or its skill? Or neither?
          It may have been nothing more mysterious than my perverse persistence.

          If I had not told the autobiographical facts surrounding that poem there is no way they could be derived
          from the poem itself, and when I read interpretations speculating on a poet's life on the basis of what he
          says in his poetry I am reminded of that gulf which I know exists inevitably between even very explicit
          autobiographical statements and actual autobiography. It has to be that way. If a poet, while he is writing,
          worries about what people will think of him he will not have the necessary freedom to make an excellent
          poem. He has to ignore all distracting temptations--to "get" someone, to psych out someone (or himself ),
          to preserve precious moments (as in snapshots--which are not likely to be works of art), to re-live life.

          Poetic license should somehow protect poets even from being asked--and should protect them from the
          impertinent speculations of their biographers and critics. For example, in creating a character, a writer
          (or poet) may draw substantially upon someone he knows. But the demands of his story or his poetic form
          may cause him to pick up characteristics from other people he has known or read about or from pure
          imagination (if there is any such thing). He cannot run along after his fiction to explain all this in detail so
          that no one will be hurt, offended, or misled--and if he even worries about that problem his work will suffer.
          Frequently I write about sexual experiences, some of which I have had, others I have heard or read about,
          others I have merely wished I had or imagined. In writing, I try to make these as convincing as possible.
          I hate to think (I won't bother to think) what kind of biography someone might put together on the basis
          of things which I have said in poems have happened to me. With friends and family the policy is clear:
          if you want to know what I think or what I have actually done, ask me, and I'll tell you as best I can.
          But please don't try to figure it out from what I have written. That may or may not be thinly disguised
          experience, but the mixture of fact and fancy is so bewildering that I would have a hard time sorting it
          out myself, and certainly no one else could begin to do so.

          The basic and most destructive confusion is between the value of the work of art and the personality
          or history of the person. We are lucky to know so little about Shakespeare, and the many efforts to
          extrapolate a biography from his plays are deservedly laughable. Suppose we were able to reconstruct
          a convincing portrait of a man by this method. What would we have? Lacking any real evidence, we are
          forced to be satisfied with something which matters a great deal more than an account of any individual
          life: a body of great literature.

          In fairness it must be acknowledged that many poets contribute to the confusion, particularly in our
          publicity-minded times. If you watch the talk-shows on TV you realize that for the sake of success it is
          almost essential today that a writer be a "personality." The writer who simply writes good books and
          refuses to make public appearances (or who comes across poorly in the media) is doomed to obscurity.
          To some extent this is true in the much less publicized world of poetry: it is much more important that a
          poet be somehow spectacular in his public appearances and in his private life (his political activity, his
          costume, his sex life) than that he write well, if fame is his objective. In this context it is not surprising
          that a good deal of modern poetry is autobiographical and confessional, and when a poet is saying in
          his verse that he has had sexual intercourse with his mother (as one has), only the coolest reader will be
          attending the quality of the expression and aesthetic value or general wisdom of the work. The public is
          much more likely to be interested in gossip about personalities than in more enduring poetic values. The
          poet who takes advantage of that propensity perhaps should have his license revoked.

          A somewhat different but similar problem concerns the poet's beliefs and attitudes. For example, one of
          the reasons for the great popularity of poetry in the Soviet Union is that poetry is recognized as a medium
          for more-or-less cryptic political utterance. People line up at the bookstores to find out what poets will dare
          say. And certainly we would not want to operate under aesthetic principles which denied the importance of
          content and personal expression of poetry. Poets use their medium to say things they have thought about
          and cared about very deeply; it would be a perversion to ignore that aspect of literal expression in reading
          and judging them.

          But it is just as serious a mistake, I believe, to lift a statement out of a poem and to regard it as a plank in
          an ideological or political platform as it is to take personal details as factual autobiography. In an art work
          all things must be understood contextually, and whatever statements of belief may mean about the actual
          beliefs of individual poets, they function primarily as pieces of an aesthetic whole, often one which modifies
          or even contradicts particular statements. Do I believe that magic is skill or that skill is magic or both or
          neither? I hope my discussion of the poem has convinced you that any honest answer would be very
          complex and deeply interwoven with experiences inside and outside that poem, not to mention the sheer
          element of design which brings the two faces of the paradox into relationship with one another.

          Just as it hardly matters what my actual experience may be, it hardly matters whether I happen to believe
          this or that. I am a highly fallible and rather accidental organism in human history. If the poem has any
          value what matters is whether in any sense it is true or casts light on truth which it cannnot hope to contain.
          It is important that we read poetry, in part, to acquire wisdom, to think profoundly, to experience deeply,
          to cultivate our own ethical sense. But it is a distortion of that process to concern ourselves literally and
          explicitly with what particular poets happen to believe or to have done or think good.

          Misunderstanding of this principle, both by poets and by readers, makes for a lot of bad poetry. Often
          when talking to beginning poets I find that passages are obscure or abstract or convoluted because the
          poets could not bring themselves to say outright what they wanted to say: they feared personal exposure,
          or they didn't want to hurt someone's feelings, or they were for some other reason afraid of being taken
          literally. Sometimes, it is true, very powerful work emerges from just that struggle against repression.
          But most often the effect is to make the poetry unreadable, dull or vague. It is as though the potter were
          afraid to touch the clay. There is no way to be a writer without using life, and especially one's own life,
          as material. If you can't do that comfortably, mingling fact and fiction as needed, without a paralyzing
          regard for what people will think of you personally, perhaps you should write music or take up some
          other less revealing art.

          Much of what I have said implies a kind of "executive privilege" for poets--and recent history has shown
          us the danger of that view of inviolable domain. Since I started writing my column in Writer's Digest
          I have found myself moving further and further from elitist views of art. I once thought that some few
          readers out there might have something significant to say and that I might help them refine their techniques
          in order to put that content into memorable poems. In recent years I have been less concerned with helping
          a few good poets than with encouraging people generally to build a nation that shares a poetic vision of life.
          That is in part a political aim. It has taken the form of my retiring from "professional" life to live and write
          on a communal farm--and that transition probably reflects a response many poets and other artists are
          having to the world situation in which they find themselves.

          I don't know what effect this change will have on my poetry or my writing about poetry, but I have learned
          a lot. For example, I have learned that publication and "success" are not nearly so important as I once
          thought they were. I have learned that the "profession" of poetry is about as ugly an exercise in self-seeking
          and competition as any other profession, but that if one is serious about poetry, he had better be very
          clear about separating it in his mind from fame and fortune (and advancement). I have learned to respect
          the promptings, however unskilled their expression, of people who use poetic form to reach out to others.
          Whether their poems will become immortal contributions to our literature is entirely another question--
          and not one of much immediate concern. (To write for immortality is probably as corrupting to the poetic
          impulse as to write for cash.)