Regarding My Work, The Extent of Its Quality

On my first day in his very popular creative writing class at Columbia, Kenneth Koch asked who, among the thirty or so students present, would like to be a great poet.

Seeing thirty or so raised hands, Koch remarked, “You do know that an age in which there are three or four great poets is known as a renaissance?”

For the present author, these sorts of odds are immaterial, of course — for, as my work demonstrates, it’s possible that an age in which there’s just one great poet might also be known as a renaissance.