As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

] came out in 1955, my first reviews were puffs. Then Stanley wrote a long, somewhat censorious review in Poetry magazine. He gave me hell about some things. He said good things about my skill, but it was a case of lots of skill but not much self-knowledge. Stanley was right .

In my seventies, I exercised to stay ambulatory. In my eighties, I exercise to avoid assisted living.

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.