Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about and were.
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.