His innocence lingers: innocence and aching vulnerability. He went unprotected by any public role. He wouldn’t have known how to be a literary man if he had wanted to try. One day he read from his poems, for an hour or so, in (wasn’t it?) a Newark department store, more or less heard, one imagines, by holiday shoppers. He would have been seventy-five then, and he did it because he was invited to. (Who could have invited him? The management?) He believed fiercely in poems, in a public need for words released, set dancing: he would do anything at all to serve that belief.
… Look at what passes for the new You will not find it there but in despised poems.
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