POETRY

  
You say that the answer to your finding acceptance by editors is: "Time and work."

Yes, but. ..

That's not enough.

Cultivate also a deeper concentration of all yourself on the poetic act. One preparation for it is this: let me beg you not to read too much contemporary prose and poetry. Expand your imagination's picture of what poetry does by withdrawing into yourself for a short time daily to read some of the great writing of the past. It's often valuable to do
this in some foreign language. It wouldn't hurt if you made a sort of ceremony of it: quietly shut the door, sit down, relax, open the book, make your mind a serene blank cup for a minute --then slowly read Baudelaire or Mallarme or Rimbaud -- for instance.

Something like that.

And remember: don't only write poetry; be a poet.

I like the poem you have sent me. The mood is admirably conveyed. But wasn't the poem on its way to a greater intensity? Before you used the title: Letter from Florence. This too has something of the "letter" quality -- that is, talking. The talking crles out to pass to
the next stage of singing, of praying, of bursting...

Something like that.
--Thornton Wilder, in a 1953 letter to Edward Albee

POLITICS

The Democrats may be reinventing the wheel, but the Republicans are reinventing the swastika.

--Gail Zappa