From who did you learn when to turn over which cards?
Yeah.
Are we missing anything?
Can you repeat the question?
Oh yeah.
Who taught me what cards to turn over.
Well, this Mississippi gambler did.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry.
I think it was a matter of--
I'm not sure.
It's a good question.
I can't isolate one person.
I think I basically at some point
started to let more of myself into my poems
that I was excluding and censoring.
And I think that's what happens when one grows as a poet.
I don't think you find your voice in some external way.
I think that phrase is very misleading.
It's as if your voice was like car keys or something
that you could find your voice in the sofa cushions.
[LAUGHTER]
I think you find your voice by allowing parts of yourself
that you have excluded unwittingly from your poetry
into your poetry.
Because I think when we write, we
tend to kind of put on these poetry goggles.
And we sit down--
many of us-- or I did.
This is what I used to do.
I used to put on my poetry goggles.
And I would sit down with the idea of committing
an act of literature.
[LAUGHTER]
And essentially, it was a humorless enterprise.
And that was one thing that I started
to allow into my poetry--
humor.
Because I've always-- my father was very humorous.
And I think I got some of his sensibility.
But I always kept that out, because I
thought that's not poetry.
So I'm not talking about dark dirty secrets.
But I think we exclude things like--
there might be a music that you like.
Or you might-- or many people don't talk about their reading.
I mean, poets generally tend to read a lot.
And many of them would never talk about reading a book.
Or things like that you can kind of allow in.
And that doesn't exactly address itself to your question.
But I think it was probably mixed in with allowing things
into my poems that I had been excluding from my poems that
made me relax.
Did you learn that from anyone, or was that something--
Well, probably Coleridge.
Not in the Mystery Poems, but in what are called
the Conversation Poems: "This lime tree
bower my prison," "The Aeolian Harp," and "Frosted Midnight."
And the conversation poems begin very casually.
"This lime tree bower my prison," begins with the word
well.
Well, they are gone, and here I must remain.
This lime tree bower my prison."
You don't begin a poem with well!
[LAUGHTER]
You know?
It's like, Elvis starts his songs with, you know, "well".
But you can't start a poem with well.
Well, he starts by saying, "Well, you know, they are gone,
here I must remain.
This lime tree bower my prison".
25 or so lines later, the poem is
lifted to a level of such intense speculation
about the nature of friendship, about the nature of nature,
and love, and landscape.
But it starts casually.
And most of the conversation-- they're called conversation
poems belatedly--
because they start with this rather kind of colloquial
relaxed thing, a kind of blue jeans or a kind of casualness
about them.
And then they lift.
They begin to inflate with speculation,
and imaginative thinking, and meditation, and whatnot.
So probably the model, I'd say, would be --
would be Coleridge and the conversation poems.