Got this note from Eric, who'd sent yesterday's mystery poem.
"I came to poetry late, aged twenty-eight. I was writing fiction, and never thought I'd become a poet, or a dramatist - wrote all my plays when I was in my thirties. With poetry, I began by writing four to six a week. My first collection, Accidental Monsters, was completed in six months. So many of my poems were dictated into a tape recorder, while I was lying in bed. For me, poetry has been a different process from fiction, essays and drama. The others must be carefully mapped out, but poetry just comes. The creative process is more passive than most laymen think, even when you are dealing with structure, poetry the most passive of all. I began writing at nineteen, in 1966."
The mystery poem was, he says, from his new book "Earthworks," which will be published this spring by Six Gallery Press. He's written 10 books, including five collections of poetry. A mention of Charles Simic brought him here.
