Back home in Connecticut, I turned on the radio and listened to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, but soon enough I became - it… it seems fated when I think about my youth - I became a literary type. But this began, in particular, I remember it beginning when I was 12. When I was 12… Oh! I said the cars… the houses only had one car, but there were trolleys and buses everywhere so people got in from the suburb of Hamden to the city of New Haven easily enough and we would take trolleys to shop and trolleys to go to the movies.  And I took when I was 12, to taking a trolley into New Haven on a Saturday afternoon to see a movie, and I loved horror movies. I loved Frankenstein and Dracula and The Wolfman and… and spin offs like Abbott and Costello meet The Wolfman [sic], whatever. The boy next door was a little older, said, ‘If you like this stuff, you ought to read Edgar Allan Poe’. Sure enough I'd never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, but my parents had a fancy book of the month club dividend. Every house had book of the month club, every house had the Reader's Digest... of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and stories and I started to read him and I thought he was absolutely marvelous.  It was weird and morbid and just what I wanted, just what I loved. So I set out to write like that. First time… we didn't have creative writing in kindergarten at that time… and the first time I remember writing anything at all, and I'm quite sure it was the first time, I wrote a poem which I can more or less recite - and will - of course, all my friends say that it's the best thing I've ever done, but this was a 12 year old:

Have you ever thought
Of the nearness of death to you?
It reeks around each corner,
It follows you through the night,
It follows you through the day,

(I... I never say it the same way twice.)

Until that moment when,
In monotones loud,
Death calls your name.
Then, then comes the end of all. 

I've written so many death poems, and I began with one, and it didn't sound like Pou… Poe at all of course, and I love Pound’s… Poe’s - I write about Ezra Pound too… I loved Poe's sound when I was 12, and I got over that, but I'd never imitated it. But there was another book in my parents library. They were great readers. They read all the time. This was another gift of theirs to me, that I grew up realising that this is what adults did at night. They sat in chairs and read. So I wanted to grow up so I sat in chairs and read. But in their library they had a biography of Poe, by Hervey Allen called Israfel... a great big 800 page biography, and I read that, and at some point, I was still 12, I read that Poe was extraordinary because when he was only 14 he was reading Shelley and Keats. Well, I had never heard of Shelley and Keats, but there was a Shelley and Keats ‘collected collected’ - one volume - in the modern library as a giant, $2.45 cents and I saved up my allowance and bought it and read Shelley and Keats and began to try to write terrible romantic poems.