I wanted to reimagine the role in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents events preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.
The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture and the wild bats flapped out.