"Business and money are the only two obscene topics left in American poetry."
Business and money are the only two obscene topics left in American poetry. You can write specifically about sexual acts or excrement in American poetry and be praised, but if you write about business, you’re considered somehow polluted. I think even the business people who are poets, there’s been about a dozen, fifteen of them, they’re really quite famous, starting with Stevens and Elliot, to people like Dickey and Eberhardt. Those people tend not to write about their experience because they know that it will essentially earn them criticism from their peers.