“The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty.”

Talking about a poet whose name has long been familiar to me (and one I often see coupled with big praise) Sam Kashner, a memoirist who claims he has given up poetry, drops in this aside:

He is “a well-known poet, for what that’s worth in America, which means he still must feel pretty lonely.”

Then Kashner goes on (apropos the Trinidad I’ve been quoting): “[P]oets can be a pretty resentful bunch, possessors of bad attitudes. ‘Heap Big Jackasses,’ Billy [Burroughs] Jr had said about the poets who came and went through the Jack Kerouac School. The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty. Just like anybody else.”

source: When I Was Cool: my life at the Jack Kerouac School by Sam Kashner. HarperCollins, New York. 2004.