What a different time, the time in which you read this. By 1961, when I was born, the Beats, that never-quite-assembled assemblage of writers in and around Columbia University—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Huncke, Orlovsky, Corso—and others further afield, Kesey, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Baraka, Olson, Bowles—had mainly disaffiliated, retired to rural or exotic landscapes. Poetry mattered then, which is not to say that poetry does not matter now, though the culture seems to have arrayed itself by this date against specialized meanings, by ghettoizing, by granting poetry a month on the calendar so that it can neglect poetry during the other eleven months. Could a major poet such as Charles Olson now seriously articulate his aesthetics by saying in an interview setting, “Where was I? I was going to create this diamond we were going to run. The suitor diamond, the sutra diamond. The sutra diamond for the superstar. Superstar. You know that’s kind of an impressive thing.” In this way making hash out of a perfectly straightforward question by Gerard Malanga. Poetry mattered and jazz mattered and the conjunction of poetry and jazz, and the behatted tenorman mattered, of whom Kerouac wrote at some length in On the Road. The novel was a reasonable form, even a diamond of its own on occasion, but the pure utterance (using the Creeley word), the first utterance, was poetry, and this could be just about anything, could be an attitude, a way of presenting the facts—the only requirement being that this poetry was not to be rewritten. First thought, best thought. Here’s Olson: “I mean, I never have rewritten almost anything. . . . (long pause).” Or Robert Creeley, responding to a question about how long the writing of a poem takes: “For me, it’s literally the time it takes to type or otherwise write it—because I do work in this fashion of simply sitting down and writing, usually without any process of revision. So that if it goes—or rather, comes—in an opening way, it continues until it closes, and that’s usually when I stop.”