PhillySound: new poetry

Yeah Conrad, you get what you get. You have your karma; you don’t find it. But resentment and competition are both brutal. It’s just that resentment gets out there. You can be in competition with a poet and never know it, like Richard Hugo talking about how difficult it was to write himself out from under Roethke. He didn’t know this was what he was doing until he thought he had done it. As for the scene, we know the pitfalls. Inside of it you feel need to say that this is it, this is the line that’s art. When youre young you have to say it more because the scene has to be more: youre so much lesser than it. The poet who knows what s/he is as a poet can say what Frank says: show up and youre the scene. Because knowing what worth you are to yourself has so much more room in it for others, greater or lesser. On the other hand, I hate the scene that cannot accommodate conflict, as though all debate need end in acquiesence.


Will Esposito