. . . I suppose I’m just too old-fashioned to talk here, but I always thought that the poet should be deeply enough involved in the complexity and many-sidedness and depth of things, that he would be naturally struggling for some sort of clarification, and that then he would put his whole effort into creating a model that would show how some clarification runs through this multiple structure of things. That a person could know something rather clearly, and deliberately complicate it, is absolutely foreign to me. And yet I think twentieth-century poetry has aimed at distortion rather than clarification. What I’m aiming toward is clarification but at the same time inexhaustibility. . . . What’s positive about a poem is that it can be clear in the way it structurally or procedurally sets itself up, and yet absolutely inexhaustible in its suggestiveness. You can approach it from so many different sides. Is that not true? And so I always thought that you can be clear about a poem, clear enough to see how it disposes itself, and yet it can invite you to consider more and other aspects of things, so that you learn from it. But the very idea of deliberately taking something that was clear and making it obscure seems to me perverse. And I’m a very perverse person myself, so I’m not blaming perversity. It’s just, that to me sounds perverse.