First I had this criticism from Jarrell; at the same time my life was falling apart, you know, my wife — my first wife — and I were the worst things that could ever have happened to each other, and we had a baby, which just quadrupled the awfulness of this. I… I started going to a… I… I had been frozen for two years, I couldn't do… I couldn't write at all — pardon me — I had a writer's block. And, so I went… I went to psycho and… and… as an outpatient, and I was part of an experimental program there where the doctor was not in the room with you, he was actually behind a one-way mirror but I didn't know that and you didn't know that at first, this was an experiment they were trying. And to my surprise, I mean I expected the doctor was going to say: 'For heaven sakes get… get out of writing poetry; I mean make a decent living.' I mean I thought they would say the kind of thing that… that my father was still saying to me, although he paid the bills, and a lot of them. A lot of them were also paid by my wife and… and like a lot of people, a lot of the veterans, I was being supported by my wife. But she was getting pretty weary of that and I wasn't showing much signs of ever going to earn a living and… and we got farther and farther apart from each other and, you know finally I took to sleeping on… on a couch, not always sure that I would wake up the next morning. I mean the… the hatred had grown very, very strong and… and although… I mean a great part of the trouble between us is that we were both very passive. I was afraid she might get very active and… and I'd become not merely passive but… but yea, level.
Anyway I… I started going to the doctor and we… we had sessions and I… I would talk and talk and talk and talk and finally I realized what was happening here was that one of us sounded like a psychiatry text book and it wasn't him; that until, you know, until you got it in your own language it didn't count. As long as you… you're saying you've got a problem but you're using language that claims you can handle it, that claims you know what to do about it, you know, and so you know, you can perfectly well go in there and say, 'Oh doctor I have a castration anxiety', until, you know, you've said, 'They're gonna take it!', you know, it doesn't count. And so I decided, you know, I decided okay, that's… that’s what's wrong with the poems. I'm… I’m always, you know, it's over- intellectualized, it's over… I'm… I'm too much acting in command of it, I have to know what it means when I start out and Frost had said, you know, it's… it’s only a fake poem if you… if the idea's been thought of first and then is saved for the last line. And of course, that's what we were all doing, and especially I was doing.
