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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.

Even though her family was black and mine white, I hewed more to her worldview than to the four-in-hand tie knotters riding the club car or going to the Yale game in Cheever’s and Salinger’s and Fitzgerald’s books.

His sole question—“Were you penetrated?”—felt coldly prurient.