In order to create poetry, you make a monster out of your own mind. You can’t get rid of him. He stays right with you every minute. Every minute of every day and every night. He produces terrible things—nightmare after nightmare. I’m subject to having them no less than any of the rest of them. But I don’t fool myself. I know what’s doing it. Writers start out taking something to aid the monster, to give them the poetry. Poets use alcohol, or any other kind of stimulant, to aid and abet this process, then eventually take refuge in the alcohol to help get rid of it. But by that time the monster is so highly developed he cannot be got rid of.
JAMES DICKEY
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