I am enormously egotistical and arrogant. I am egotistical and arrogant enough to know that no matter what I write, I can always improve it; that there is always a chance (however small) that it could turn out to be the poem that speaks to a generation. I am egotistical and arrogant enough to expect people to be entertained by what I write. I am egotistical and arrogant enough to expect that people will pay attention when I offer my opinion on their own writing.
I am egotistical enough to put a well-turned limerick on the same plinth as a crown of sonnets and consider them equal in the eyes of the poetry gods (the ones that exist to do my bidding). I am arrogant enough to expect others to live up to the same exacting standards for everything they write.
And my ego and arrogance is such that when I die and someone at last decides that I've written some poems worth paying my children for, I want to be sold as a poet (always and forever only a small "p") who weighed every word and extracted every nuance from the language, who drew from the ocean of ten thousand years of poetry... and who gave something back.
I am egotistical enough to put a well-turned limerick on the same plinth as a crown of sonnets and consider them equal in the eyes of the poetry gods (the ones that exist to do my bidding). I am arrogant enough to expect others to live up to the same exacting standards for everything they write.
And my ego and arrogance is such that when I die and someone at last decides that I've written some poems worth paying my children for, I want to be sold as a poet (always and forever only a small "p") who weighed every word and extracted every nuance from the language, who drew from the ocean of ten thousand years of poetry... and who gave something back.
It could be worse