SOURCE: “Interview with Louis Simpson,” in The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets, University of Georgia Press, 1985, pp. 140–58.

In the following interview, originally conducted in 1980, Simpson discusses his formative influences, his approach to writing poetry, his artistic aims and thematic concern with ordinary experience, and his views on contemporary American poetry.

The interview was originally conducted at Mr. Simpson's home in Port Jefferson, New York, in March of 1977. Searching for the Ox had been published in 1976 and Mr. Simpson was working on his third volume of criticism, A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (1978). The interview was updated in Mr. Simpson's hotel room on the campus of the University of Houston in the spring of 1980, just before the publication of Caviare at the Funeral.

[Stitt:] When did you begin writing poetry?

[Simpson:] My first published poems came out in a...