Q&A …

… Timothy Murphy, Interview: Issue 18 - The Cortland Review.

Ashbery and Ammons strike me as frauds who hold their audiences in contempt. Isn't Ammons' great poem entitled "Garbage?' Ashbery goes off into this puzzling space which needs to be deconstructed and deciphered by the Helen Vendlers of the world, and I have no time for that whatsoever. The extraordinary thing about Set the Ploughshare Deep is that, to this day, it is being bought by the hunters and farmers for whom I wrote the book. I believe that the poet speaks for his tribeññit is a very old-fashioned ideal. I do not agree at all with the alienated intellectual creeping off into a cavern to pity himself like J. Alfred Prufrock.