I believed as Whitman and Zukofsky, one writes the same poem all one's life. It's a continuous pattern. Since it's almost forty years ago, I hear it with that objectivity, call it. That can tell you what then happened. That's an image of the artist, poet included, I think is finally useless - however moving that particular poem may be.
Poetry is based on communal sources.
However the poet may manage it, being alone is not to my mind a requisite condition. Ferrini had sent me some poems of his which I'd effectually rejected for a mag I hoped to start, etc. Otherwhere Williams remarks how the fact a letter he'd written D.H. Lawrence never got an answer persuaded him always to answer those he got as best he could. People being human, it's hard to keep up at times. But the letters Olson and I wrote were a particular case, a use to both of us that nothing else could quite manage.