first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion
lacing it all together is his own elegiac longing for some solid ground he never really finds
I just couldn’t stop seeing my marriage except colored by our divorce, and I wrote the same pages over and over, not making stuff up, but canting the material one way, then another. At first I wrote events that cast him as perfect and me as a drunken slag. Then I wrote him as an icy WASP and myself as a tender heart.
Here’s an execrable excerpt from my 1978 poem “Civilization and Its Discontents”
This whole herd of poets—all but Dickinson classically educated—operates on elision and emotional reserve.
