Great Regulars: A man of considerable independent means

(his family owned an extremely lucrative coal distribution business in St Louis, where he was raised), he lacks the financial imperative to hawk his poetry, and has always disdained to board the poets' merry-go-round of reviewing and teaching, and readings (which he reportedly "loathes"). On the other, the poems themselves seem almost designed to keep his readers at arm's length. Replete with cash and defiantly frank about the pleasures of spending it, brusquely honest about the compulsive pleasures of sex ("We kiss" he says in one poem of an older man's encounter with a much younger woman, "It's almost incest when it gets to this"), his poems tend, as his editor Jonathan Galassi once put it, to be "uncompromising to the point of cruelty".

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Chronicle of excess

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