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PN Review 275
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This poem is taken from PN Review 52, Volume 13 Number 2, November - December 1986.

Not a Paris Interview F.T. Prince

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,
...


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