Phyllis

Dear Valeria,

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

...but on the other hand...

Popular literature had been creeping into poetry, fantasy, children's rhymes, song lyrics, and eventually it all got absorbed into my science fiction, and by the end of the seventies (just about the time the great outburst of interest in poetry began to shrink) I stopped being a productive poet simply from lack of poem-shaped ideas. Now my aliens write poems, and I produce them very occasionally. I miss them, but if I tried to force them I'd produce only empty stuff.

Yours sincerely,

Phyllis Gotlieb