Thrilling Difficulty.

Guernica: When did you begin to call yourself a poet?

Robert Pinsky: Frost's dictum that it is for other people to say still has force for me. I tend to say "I am a writer" and "I write poems." When it seems too elaborate or pretentious to avoid, I will use the word about myself, but I tend to be a little shy of it— almost superstitiously, to keep it sacred. Or just to hope that others will say it, will apply the word to what I write.

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