We went hitchhiking together - kind of a disastrous hitchhiking trip together - but the friendship endured, and we began to write letters to each other, and I think there's supposed to be something like 20,000 letters - that is 10,000 each, back and forth. He's a great letter writer, and I'm notorious for writing lots and lots of letters. And in the letters we'd show each other our poems. I've said I'll know if either one of us has ever published anything without showing it to the other first. We don't always approve of course, I mean we don't always agree with what the other says, but we've helped each other a lot, and each of us has words in the poems of the others. When I went to Oxford and met Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, I discovered that grown-ups did this too... they had lines in each other's work, but I though it was just us. And Bly was my closest friend there, and in all... all in all is my closest friend forever, but there were other remarkable people around at the time. Adrienne Rich was at Radcliffe in the same class, but because of the politics of the time, she could not be on The Advocate [sic] because she was female, however, we did publish her in The Advocate - we could do that. And we saw her and talked with her. It was Bly who found her one time at a mixer over at Radcliffe and said he'd met this girl from Baltimore, father's a surgeon, knows all about modern poetry, and I met her later, and in fact we double-dated. Adrienne was my date, and Bob Bly had a Radcliffe friend of hers and we sat in a beer hole and drank beer. A few years ago I met the... Bob Bly's date again for the first time in 50 years, and I said, 'What did we talk about those nights?' And she told me, she said, 'You and Adrienne and Robert read your poems, or said your poems'. So she was our audience... very important. She was a very bright, lovely woman. But... anyway the friendship with Adrienne actually ripens later, not then when we were undergraduates, but she was another one... there were so many of us who went on to publish so many books, who all knew each other at that time. Frank O'Hara was not on The Advocate, but he knew everybody who was. John Ashbery was an Advocate editor before me, and so was Kenneth Koch, and, who else? Well later, Louis Begley, the novelist, and Harold Brodkey, the novelist were there. I'm afraid I'm leaving out one of the poets. But anyway, O'Hara, Ashbery, Bly, Koch, Adrienne Rich and me...
[Q] Was it Ginsberg?
No, he was at Columbia. It was a great gang and we didn't all love each other and we quarreled, but that was fun... the competition was strong. Half of us were veterans of the war... Bly had been in the navy, and so had... had O'Hara. Koch was in the army. Ashbery, and Adrienne and I were too young, and had not been, but those of us who were younger I think learnt by competition with the elders also. We would... when we were accepting poems for the magazine, we took ourselves very seriously... nobody was printed because he was a favorite. We would stay up at Editorial Board meetings, arguing until two, three in the morning about what poems were good enough to print in The Advocate. And that's very self-important, and I don't regret it for a moment... we were taking it seriously, we were taking poetry seriously. We were arguing taste. We were learning by competing. It was wonderful. And The Advocate was one of those centers of my undergraduate life. I had wonderful classes but I also had tutorial with a couple of very good tutors, but best of all was probably the other students at The Advocate or in the dining hall, where a kind of spirited bull session was constantly going on, and yeah, we'd look for trouble. I remember taking my tray and pushing it up to a table full of musicians... there was a talented organist, there was a flutist who became a musicologist and I put my tray on the table, sat down, and said, 'Music is immoral... is immoral'. And we were off, we were off... it was a wonderful time. There were bad moments... I broke up with my girl from high school, and oh, had a series of dates and adventures... all of which turned out to be disasters. I met there my first wife, whom I married later. I'm not going to talk about that marriage... it ended in divorce after 15 years, but it was there that I found her. And as I went on to Harvard, things became easier for me. With... when at Exeter, C had been a good grade, but I think I only got one C at Harvard. I found out you don't have to get C's at Harvard, and I was terrifically tunnel vision... I majored in English, and oh, took it easy on myself with the required distribution... you had to take something in science... I took something very easy, and so on. But within English, I took almost entirely poetry... I skipped prose, and I never took a course in music. I never took a course in art, and just a few years later I wrote a book about the sculptor Henry Moore. I did... I began in my last year... year and a half to look at pictures more, to broaden out more, to go to jazz clubs a lot in Boston, and so on, but, it was in general, an enormously happy time. With The Advocate and the dining hall at the center of it really... is great friendships, great conversation, that went on and on.
