Slater.
Let me come home.
The letters have proved insufficient.
The mind cannot hang to them as it could to the words.
There are ways beyond what I have here to work with,
what my head cannot push to any kind of conclusion.
But my own ineptness cannot bring them to hand
the particulars of those times we had talked.
"Men kill themselves because they are afraid of death,"
he says, "the push beyond end, into."
Respect.
They said he respected the ones with the learning, lacking
it himself, Waldo Frank and his six languages what
had seemed important.
While Crane sailed to Mexico, I was writing,
so that one betrayed himself.
He slowed without those friends to keep going to,
keep up, stopped dead in the head,
could not go further without those things.
So it was, I entered the broken world.
Hart Crane.
Hart.
That was perhaps the first poem that I felt, for my own needs,
began to hold a response to what I
felt it necessary to say in the actual way I had it
on the page.
We've heard so much.
Those of you who are interested in senses of writing,
or who are interested now in writing poetry
are very aware of the incredible amount of emphasis that's
come to be placed on the issues of line,
or all the technical aspects of poetry,
and I daresay that many of you feel that it's
become an overemphasis.
But again, in the '40s and early '50s,
there was a need to think of these things as precisely as
possible simply because senses of poetry had become,
more or less static.
Not to make that a criticism simply,
but I mean by that the formal nature of poetry
had been assumed to be of this or that character,
to be a formal structure of stanza, and so forth and so on.
And so poets again is Williams, William Carlos Williams,
or even Ezra Pound equally at that time,
were questioned because of their apparent idiosyncrasies
and eccentricities of manner.
So that any of the younger men who
are trying to find some way to register terms of feeling
had to take on this whole issue of how the poem would
be literally put on the page to make these emphases of concern
clear.
So all of the early poems in this particular book,
now that I come back to them after all this is about 12,
15 years later in some cases, I can see this marked concern.
Here's one for Charles Olson, who
had a tremendous influence on me at that time
and continues to have.