Instigated by Jordan Davis, I found an old Graduate School paper I had written on Kenneth Koch, taking the short story "The Postcard Collection" as my point of departure. I wrote the paper in 1983 or 1984, and I believe, sincerely, that it still kicks some serious ass. I don't think I could come up with something as original now. Of course to publish it I would need to revise it and bring the bibliography up to date, but I think my central point is still valid. Now I understand why I am impatient with Graduate Students. I pretty much knew what I was doing at age 23 and spoke with a certain critical authority. I still have Gilbert Sorrentino's comments on the first version of the paper. He pointed me in the direction of Raymond Roussel and Harry Mathews. He also mentions Ashbery, Antin, Chomsky, Valéry, Stevens.

When I first studied with Gil Sorrentino, in a course on William Carlos Williams, it was the first graduate course he had ever taught. He didn't really know how to teach a graduate course, in the conventional sense, though he was far superior to almost everyone else in Stanford in the pre Perloff days.

When Marjorie Perloff was about to be hired, at Stanford, Denise Levertov wrote a nasty letter and put it in the boxes of everyone in the English department. Pretty much a personal attack on Marjorie and her ideas. She was incensed that Marjorie was taking the Language poets seriously. Someone sent the letter to Perloff as well, I believe. Me perhaps?