Andre: Prior to the sixties you suppressed the direct autobiographical allusions. But now you seem to be pulling in more actual facts. Would you say again this is related to movements in poetry, such as confessional poetry?

Levertov: I'm rather antagonistic on the whole to what is called confessional poetry which seems to exploit the private life. I've even felt that some young poets, students, feel that they have to make a suicide attempt, that they must spend some time in a mental hospital in order to be poets at all. I think that's rather a bad idea. I feel at this point in my life--I'm forty-seven, and I've been writing since I was five years old, and publishing since I was about 20--that I have maybe earned the right to write more personal poems if I feel like it. I'm often bored and impatient with poems by young poets who, before learning how to relate to language, to make a poem that has structure, has music, has some kind of autonomy, launch out into confessional poems. It seems to me something that you earn by a long apprenticeship. I think the first poem in which I was largely autobiographical was in a group called "The Olga Poems" about my sister and that will be re-printed in my new book. It seems to be a prelude to some of the later stuff and I want to get it all into one book. I've written an "Introduction" for that book:

The justification then of including in a new volume poems which are available in other collections is aesthetic. It assimilates separated parts of a whole. And I'm given courage to do so by the hope that whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional autobiography but as a document of some historical value, a record of one person's inner and outer experience in America during the sixties and the beginnings of the seventies, an experience which is shared by so many and which transcends the peculiar details of each life, though it can only be expressed through those details.