Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.
To write as a woman is to write from an extreme situation: the assumption behind Erica Jong's and Adrienne Rich's recent poetry. It gives energy to their lines. And I suspect, it gives them readers they might not ordinarily have. This can be a temptation (I think it is for Erica Jong) to play to that audience. But for the most part it must mean poet touching reader, reader touching poet, in a way that can make both more alive.
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