I came to out west with one goal — to study poetry at San Francisco State. One of the great legends at the time was Phil Levine who directed the fabulous Creative Writing program at Fresno State. Anyway, I was lucky enough to have taken a workshop with him once when he came to SF. What a wonderful human being!
At the time there was sort of a battle between narrative poets (me) and language poets (everybody else I knew who was . . .