Annotations for Personal Life: Suicide

I was curious, going through your collected poems, I found a number of poems about suicides. It did strike me. And it was Rothko and Levy and...

We're getting far away from Poets House but can you understand suicide? What provokes people to--

Oh yes, yes. It's perfecty intelligible to me. It's not anything I would be inclined to do, maybe I'm speaking to early, but I love life too much.

But I could imagine why one would do it, and I don't consider it by any means to be a criminal act or a immoral act.

Well , except, would you agree these suicide bombers...

Right. But in terms of killing yourself, that's your own decision.

Yeah. Mhm. If you have to kill anybody, it should be yourself.

Very early, yes. And I was lucky in a way, aside from the misfortune of my talk of suicide, in that I had teachers who told me I was going to be a poet from the fourth grade on.