EDITOR’S NOTE: This poem was originally published in the April 23, 1983 edition of The Nation. 

I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you’re older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was he was in his thirties he snapped down his nose with an accent I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don’t write