I got together with one of my best friends from high school, Sherri (Berry) Peach, at a nice restaurant in Sherman Oaks, halfway between Valencia where she lives and Miracle Mile where I live. We decided that since we both look pretty much exactly the same as we did twenty years ago, we were "least changed" --

I apoligised for introducing her to her first husband --

Anyway, as I gave her DaDaDa, and as she had three martinis (I was driving, but she is going to come over to our house for dinner sometime) and started calling people from high school (it was midnight in the midwest), and as the most successful of these people, at least that we know of, Adam Avery at Avery Brewing in Boulder, Colorado, called me back, I was trying to think of a way to describe my writing that would make sense

I mean, is Wallace Stevens Donovan to TS Eliot's T Rex? Is Pound Dylan? Who is William Carlos Williams? Is he John Lennon? Who is someone like Tim Buckley? Wilfred Owen? Is Sasson Phil Ochs? Is Mina Loy Nico? Or is she Janis Joplin, since someone has to be Janis, and Marianne Moore is a very unlikely Janis, but she's better than Marianne Faithful?

Can you do the same thing for bands? Is Alice Duer Miller Moby Grape, Mary Aldis the Beau Brummels? Is Poetry corporate beast Peter Paul and Mary while The Little Review is the Mamas and the Papas, or is Poetry Crosby Stills and Nash and The Little Review Creedence Clearwater Revival?

Is Brenda Shaughnessy PJ Harvey?

Is Dylan Thomas the Minutemen to Yeats' Black Flag and Henry Rollins?

So where would you fit in?

Could I be an unholy alliance of Kathy Acker, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, Man Ray and all of his wives, or is Marianne Moore wearing leather and on ecstasy a better comparison? Ah, too grandiose.

After all, in the movie of my life, I'd probably be played by Spacek or Goldie Hawn.

In the movie of your life, who...?

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