Reading A Good Poem Can

I Remember Coming Upon Philip Larkin In My 20s In The Early '60s And When Sylvia Plath's "ariel" Came Out It Knocked Me Off My Feet.

I Majored In English In College And That Was My Major In Graduate School Before Switching To Creative Writing. I Read A Lot Of [charles] Dickens And [anthony ] Trollope, But There Was Lots Of Stuff I Hadn't Read Like Thackeray's "vanity Fair," Which Is So Well Written And Funny.

Reading A Good Poem Can Give Me A Far Bigger Kick Than A Novel. But It's Not Something I Can Keep Doing. It Would Be Like Shooting Up 10 Times A Day.

Louise Gluck, C.k. Williams, Thomas Lux. A Lot Of The Poets That I Like Are The Ones That Influenced Me As A Writer.

For The Past Thirty Years Or So, Much American Poetry Has Been Marked By An Earnestness That Rejects The Comic. This Has Nothing To Do With Seriousness. The Comic Can Be Very Serious. The Trouble With The Earnest Is That It Seeks To Be Commended. It Seeks To Be Praised For Its Intention More Than For What It Is Saying.