Jean Burden

The people you see at the gym who work so hard and never change, don't you feel sorry for them?

No, I just think about what they'd look like if they didn't go the gym.

Erich Auerbach supposedly wrote Mimesis in a vacuum in Istanbul. By vacuum it's meant that there was no great library in Istanbul when Auerbach was writing Mimesis--"we don't bother with books.They burn," the dean of the university told Auerbach, who was thus forced to create a book that otherwise would have gone uncreated, a masterpiece.

The great Flaubert wrote a really bad book, Salammbo, laboring on it for years. Much tobacco was smoked, during which Flaubert did copious, painstaking research. The novelist John Banville, a Flaubert devotee, acknowledging the awfulness of Salammbo, said. "it would have been much better if he'd made it all up."

Jean Burden, the poetess, my mentor in a sense, since she took me in and let me join her workshop in the early 1970's, liked to say that writing made her tired. Jean was sleight, almost frail, she was 55 and I was 20, how could writing make me tired? Hauling lumber made me tired, painting a 2-story house with a 5-gallon bucket, playing full court basketball at Venice Beach.

I never watched Jean write a poem, but I know how she worked. She sat at her desk in the study of her little red house in Pasadena, writing by hand and then typing up her poem on an IBM Selectric. It's a really good poem too, about a blind gardener.