Here's one, my answer to Betsy Franco, who wanted to know who my favoritge poet is: " Favorite poet? Gah! E. E. Dylan Shakeworth? I think about twenty are tied for the position. But if you HAVE to have one name, I guess I'd have to say E. E. Cummings. My favorite living poet, by a hundredth of an inch over fifteen or more others, is Scott Helmes. I think."

Here's what I wrote to New-Poetry about my work on the Shakespeare sonnet: "As I think I've mentioned I've been working for several months on and off on what I hope will be a near-complete analysis of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18." As a stand-alone poem, that is. Anyway, I've just finished toting up the number of what I call "melodations," or alliterations, assonances, etc. My question is: how close does one member of a melodation (excluding end-rhymes) have to be to another (in general) to count? My arbitrary feeling is no more than ten iambs. Any opinions?"

"Is there any Certified View of the matter?"

Now to my Final Thought on Religion, and I'm outta here: the ultimate and centralmost cause of all religions is the need for conformity. That doesn't mean it's the only cause. Or that conformity is necessarily bad: we're all at least 96.77% conformists. Still, I claim that a person's intelligence is directly proportionate to the person's tolerance of non-conformity. (But no one is more than 0.0017% more intelligent than the stupidest among us.)