All the time I was... I was working on poems. I was beginning to publish. Toward the end of my first year at Oxford, about the Newdigate time, I sent some poems to John Layman who was doing a BBC radio programme... Third Programme called, New Soundings, and he had recently published the first poems that anybody had ever heard by Thom Gunn, who was over at Cambridge. And I sent stuff in, and he took one of mine, and it was the first time I ever received a paycheck for my... for a poem. And then I began to sell to American magazines too, while I was at Oxford first, and then after graduation we returned. At Oxford I had applied... while I was there, my last year... I had applied for graduate school at Harvard to do a PhD, and I didn't really want to do one... I wanted to spend another year on fellowship somewhere. So I applied for a Fulbright, and I did not get one. But also, at... in Oxford, I had... I had met an American who had had a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, California. He told me about it. I applied for that. Anything to avoid graduate school, and I got it. So we came back to America, and drove across the country, with my wife pregnant with our first child, out to Stanford. And I spent a year at Stanford working with the American critic... new critic, Yvor Winters, and I've written at length about working with Winters. He was a strange and powerful man - I learnt a great deal from him - and, my first child, my son Andrew was born in April, out at... in California. While I was out there that year, that year at Stanford the year after Oxford, I finally began to publish a lot. Every time I sent poems out to a magazine, they'd take something, and it was an amazing year - it was very exciting. I felt that heady thing of early success. Somebody wrote me that my letters sounded like press releases, and they were right, you know. And, I tried to tone myself down a bit, but, I wrote a poem when Andrew was born, which was published in The New Yorker under the title of First Child, and it is the poem that, probably of all my poems, that has been more reprinted in anthologies. It's called, My Son, My Executioner, which is the first name... first line of the poem. I was 25 when I wrote it, and in the poem I think I feel my age considerably at that time - I've been feeling it all my life - but The New Yorker took another poem, and then many other magazines did.
