It is one thing to murder your little darlings, as writers like to say, but as a poet it is wholly another thing to murder your children, those you have raised from birth on the page, tended with care hoping they might one day leave home and find their place in the world. How do you face them when assembling a book and tell them “you are not good enough and I don’t have the time or energy to make you better.” How do you drown out their entreaties that they could rise to the occasion if only you would listen to them, hear what they say, what is missing. But you do not have the time for such activities when the manuscript is nearing completion. So, painful though it is as a parent, you shun them and tell them perhaps they can appear in the next book. That is the hell of the poet.