“Whatever I’ve done, good, bad, or indifferent, I’ve done it and nothing can be added or substracted from it. There was an interesting article, a couple weeks ago in the New York Times magazine. It was called Ezra Pound’s Silence. To me it’s perfectly fascinating. Pound’s silence, to me, was better than the last work of Olson and William Carlos Williams. That late work was bad, it shouldn’t have happened. They should have stopped. Pound knew this about himself. He knew somehow, that the best thing he could do was to listen to his heartbeats, to sleep, to eat three meals a day. He sat at his desk and waited, and it was very beautiful . . . Olson incidentally used a phrase, I picked it up again in one of his poems the other day, a phrase that, it’s a term that fascinated me too, that I used in Genoa. It’s the term proud flesh. It’s the flesh that grows when you cut yourself. Your body produces, it’s almost cancer-like, your body overproduces to compensate, then finally reduces itself back. This is the kind of thing that I’m talking about.”

(Paul Metcalf interviewed by Russell Banks, Lillabulero 12 (Winter 1973), pp. 32–3.)