MS: Well, a good reader of poetry may be very much like an actor working on his part, because he reads the poem aloud to himself again and again, and sometimes he learns it by heart. And it becomes familiar. It, finally, becomes part of him. A poem releases itself, secretes itself, slowly—almost, sometimes, poisonously—into the mind of the reader. It does it with cadence, it does it with combinations that might strike the reader as beautiful. Of course, God knows what the beautiful is. I don’t know. Because the beautiful fifty years from now will be what is seen as the ugly now or what’s insupportable now or barely tolerated now. But, you know, I think if you try too hard to be immediately comprehensible to your audience, if you give too much to the moment, you’re also giving too much to the status quo. The poet’s obligation isn’t to his audience, primarily, but to the language that he hopes he’s perpetuating. And when you think of how long it takes us to understand each other, for example—and how much leeway we give other areas of knowledge in our lives—why can’t we be a little more patient with poetry? The language of a poem is meant to be meditated on. You clear a psychic space for poetry. It’s a space in which words loom large.