I went to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in the summer of 1987. We were in a crowded room talking about Paterson, the epic poem by William Carlos Williams, which prompted Ginsberg to recite a few lines from “The Descent.” Then he stopped his recitation and said, “Poems are a graph of the mind.” Yes, I thought, and later used his words as the epigraph for my long poem (and book), “Graph.”
