Now I have to grade that Ph.d. exam!

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When I used to try to write a poem by revising it into existence, the results always sounded cramped, Creeleyesque in a negative way. I revise very little, prose or poetry, because it only gets rid of uninteresting ideas. It doesn't produce anything on the positive side. I'd rather toss a poem than revise it. Write something new. (Creeley himself doesn't really revise, nor does Ashbery, as I understand it.) Get to the point where you can write at your best without revising. Write a million poems. The references I had before reading the "Million Poems Notebook" were Koch's 1001 Avant-Garde Plays and Queneau's "Un cent mille millard de poèmes."