The poet has said of himself and his work: I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters - Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov.""