In the American Grain"

"Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways:
I am a writer. I was half-wasp already,
I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day.
My poems came back...often rejected, though never
forgotten in New York, this Jewish state
with insomniac minorities.
I am sick of the enlightenment:
what Wall Street prints, the mafia distributes;
when talent starves in a garret, they buy the garret.
Bill Williams made less than Band-Aids on his writing,
he could never write the King's English of The New Yorker.
I am not William Carlos Williams. He
knew the germ on every flower, and saw
the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.

Author: Robert Lowell