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You have given me an honorable job. I didn't know what I was going
to do with my life when I got out of college. I'm 48, I'm probably a
lot of your parents' age, more or less. I haven't had any kids--I mean
I definitely won't. It's a very hot year, 1998, the earth moving closer
and closer to the sun and me going through menopause, so I probably
wasn't going to have any kids anyhow, but now I definitely won't. I
teach a lot, and I have a lot of friends in their twenties and I like
your generation tremendously, I feel very close to you, and you'd probably
like my poetry if you read it, it's basically just like this talk, it's
something to do. Being a poet is a job, but it's a made up one. There's
no job description and that's what I like. I liked the vague feeling
of being in college, it may not have been that way for you. well, it
wasn't for me either, exactly. It was exciting. I discovered that loving
literature could be a job and then I decided I didn't want that one,
and I got depressed and a lot more happened to me when I was in college
but what was wonderful about college as an institution is that it encompassed
everything that I felt, it held me for a while. People would say, what
do you do and I'd say that I was a student and they'd say great. You
couldn't go wrong, it was like washing your clothes. No one argues with
laundry, or the identity of a student, it's a cyclical thing, you just
have to go through and I did.
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