Annotations for Voice: Laughter

Oh, well, I can answer with a Borges quotation. Say, when you look yourself at a mirror, you don't know how your face is. You don't know if you are handsome or very ugly. It's very difficult. You don't really know. I would like my books to have the same influence that the great writers that I admire, but I really don't know what my own books are, you know? I don't know. I cannot measure them with the minimal objectivity that I can value, books of others.

That's a hard question.

Yeah, nobody possesses poetry. Poetry posesses you, is another way of putting it. So that was the beginning.

I feel exactly the same way. I am very passionate about my politics. And it's not conservative. So.

I think that--so many poets have told me they did the same thing.

In a way, that seemed perfectly natural to me. I had been with him just a few days before and there was an aura already about him that I felt.

That's a good point. But from early on you decided to be a poet.

Yeah. And I believed them. Yeah, I really did.

Tall, petite. You know, I just loved the sound of that word. And to her it was beautiful. And who knows why, but she thought so.

I wish I knew.

Oh, they're lying around or in my manuscript collection at Princeton, which, Princeton Public Library, who took over everything in my desk.

Well, they brought, they sent a truck, and they had room and they wanted to fill the room. I gave them everthing I had.

I wouldn't want to, I don't want to. It's like looking at one's grave.

Well, not for me. I'm not even computer savvy and I don't want to be.

Well, I go from pencil to pen and then to my old, battered Hermes. How many thousand? It's called Hermes 2000, yeah. Mhm.

Well, so is poetry. Maybe that---I hadn't thought of that affinity. But obviously the springtime association is essential to understanding that.

Oh yeah, I go. But I don't walk across the bridge. I'm in a car.

Privileges of age are, I think that one has earned a certain degree of independence that one can do what one pleases. Even with one's work. And one isn't likely to be challenged in the way you are in your youth when you first publish your poems and get a response that is usually called diffidence.

You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.

Yes. I don't know all of them but many of them meet me in the street and invent themselves or present themselves. Who knows what. But it's an extraordinary experience to be walking in the village here these days and the number of persons who greet you. And I don't think of myself as a public person but obviously poetry is part of the life in this village, as I guess it always has been, and it's the reason I came here in 1928, which is a long time ago.

I came to the village immediately. And in fact I found a basement apartment on 9th street between 5th and 6th. I was paying $25 a month because I was in the back room with the basement and there was a noisy tenant in the front. The noise lasted all night, and one day I pounded on the door and, much to my amazement, the door opened and there was a bartender in his white jacket and he said, "Buddy, what's the trouble?" And I said, "I'm trying to sleep, that's the trouble." And I was working, and I had an office job. And he said, "Well, I don't know what I can do about the noise, but I tell you what: anytime you want a drink,"--this is a speakeasy, of course--"just come in. I'll be glad to give you anything you like." That was our agreement, and it worked out very well. And I slept better ever after.

The Bowles? No. No, I didn't. I'm sorry, I didn't.

Cummings I knew very well. He was a good friend. And Marianne Moore was one of the first to publish me in The Dial. I've ever been grateful for her. I'll tell you another story about her.