With everybody scrambling for attention, with the roaring demand for notice and recognition and validation, one can get very cynical, disillusioned, discouraged... it's happened to me... but we mustn't let discouragement rule the day. It's the vast storehouse of hidden, modest acts of kindness & generosity which makes art/culture possible (along with the malice & snobbery - & the talent itself).

I wouldn't be messing with poetry today if it hadn't been for those teachers in elementary school, junior high, high school, who brought us books ("The Charge of the Light Brigade", or A Gift of Watermelon Pickle, or Baudelaire), who insisted we recite out loud in front of the class...

& the poetry exists separate & apart from the ego trips... art is a renunciation or surpassment of wilfulness & personality... it's an upsurge from somewhere else...

I think back to my early reactions to the professional literary scene, the names, the magazines, the world of it all... the main feeling on my part was timidity, self-doubt, disorientation... the sense of not-belonging, of awkwardness, of being a provincial, on the periphery, a neophyte, naive, a bumpkin, tongue-tied...

& it's a curious thing, this capability to write... the pen counterbalances the psychological barriers, the personal character issues, proceeding to a sort of metamorphosis... the writer and the person a symbiosis of slightly differing elements... (a very shady difference).