“Do you understand the nature of immortality like Dickinson?”
“Have you read Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens? “They are American you know?”
“What do you think of Dylan Thomas?” “Oh…..but he is Welsh”
“And what about Sylvia Plath and the confessional movement?” “She a woman, but an American woman right”
“Of course we cannot not accept you, unless you tell us about Whitman and the American epic”.
“Oh yes… one more thing. We don’t want any poems that caustically indict bourgeois poetic values or celebrate the desperate…… like that Bukowski fellow”.