Not a Paris Interview

Q. Now that few people need
A poem which requires them
To turn the page - it tires them:
Why in your work has a read
Of about three hundred lines
Lately become the norm?

A. If I am tempted to perform
A 'bit part', he declines;
The manager, I mean.
- We will come to him, but
Not by a short cut.

In the classroom, at fifteen,
My first poem hummed over
Shakespeare's 'bare ruin'd choirs.'
Keats had then brought me satyrs
To snuff yellow broom and clover.
But a beginner in
The Twenties, even there,
...