Daniel Nester on the death of a New York poet:

I looked around at these people and real­ized I could not tell any of them that this was all depress­ing, that all of this seemed like a colos­sal waste of time, that none of these poems we were cheer­ing on would change a thing, that we were fool­ing around with a sacred art with poems that used fool­ish word­play that had noth­ing to do with real feel­ing. I wanted to tell them about Valery’s warn­ing about the painstak­ing embell­ish­ments. I wanted to say we should stop living in frag­ments. But I said noth­ing. I had become a mimic. I had worn out my wel­come. I felt like a traitor.

…

My com­plaint, if there is one, is not that New York Poets are rude. It is that New York Poets are too nice, that they don’t tell the truth to each other enough. In New York, you see, it also helps to have some­one else say you are a poet. Beneath the sur­face politesse and mod­esty of the New York Poet runs an under­cur­rent of exclu­sion you only sense years later. To be cod­dled in New York City as a poet is to be killed slowly.