I was, you know, writing terrible long poems and they would be... one was called Night Wanderer and it was about me wandering around the Haven at night, sort of a romantic figure of course. I... part of all this was I loved poetry... I didn't know much about it, of course, but I loved revelling in it, and reading it, and I think I came to writing poetry most out of loving poetry, but there was another thing that is always there... I wanted to be attractive to the girls, and I tried being an athlete, which was sort of the best way but I was terrible. I was cut from the eighth grade team in baseball, and never bothered to go out for anything in high school... I was just a terrible athlete, and so instead I would be the romantic figure. I would be the actor or I would be the poet, and became a poet, and that was certainly a motive. A few years back I was out in Nebraska and some... in a high school and a kid asked me how I got started writing poetry and I told about Edgar Allan Poe and Dave Johnstone, and a tall blond boy said 'Didn't you do it to pick up chicks?', and I said, 'Oh yeah, I forgot about that, yeah, I forgot about that part'. But that was certainly part of it, and I went about high school being the flâneur. I invented a sentence, that I used to utter from time to time, just trying to be interesting, crazy, weird, and the sentence was, 'Dead people don't like olives'. And out of nowhere, silence, walking along beside a girl, I would say, 'Dead people don't like olives'. I don't think it was very effective, really, but there was all that side to everything, and at the same time I was reading poems. In my... in the freshman English textbook, there were poems by someone called HD - the American Hilda Doolittle who wrote under her initials - and I loved them. And they are very beautiful imagist things, very Greeky, and very assonantal. In so many ways, my way into poetry has been the sound the poetry makes. Beginning with Poe, who sounded kinda vulgar, but going on to poets like Pound and like HD, and made very beautiful assonance, particularly deriving from... the parts I liked the best probably... I think derived more from Greek lyric poetry than from anything else... it's the most musical poetry in the world.
