They say that golfers’ games go to hell when they lose confidence, which is an elusive thing. But when you have confidence, they say, the hole looks as big as a basketball hoop. Confidence, notoriously, comes and goes. Over the last decade I have written probably fifty poems, or drafts of poems, that I have never quite managed to finish or send out to editors. I lacked confidence in them. My game was off. But over the last year or so I have been going back to those poems and finishing some of them and sending them out and they are beginning to get published. I blame the avant garde. I blame flarf and conceptual poetry and Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and all the Language Poets from sea to shining sea. I have always, temperamentally and politically, identified with the cutting edge, with the most progressive policy, with the new. Make it NEW, Pound told me when I was but an impressionable boy. I tried to be like those guys. I kept tinkering with my swing. The result was that I was always hooking or slicing of digging the club into the fairway. Jim Furyk has a swing you would never teach to a beginner, but he has been ranked as high as number two in the world — it’s a funny-looking loopy thing, but it’s his swing and he has made it work. I think I’m maybe finding my swing.
Jul 082009