After twelve years as a poet in New York City, Daniel Nester quit both teaching and New York. In a thoughtful essay for The Morning News, he looks back to reconsider why he left:

As the years went by in New York, I felt separated from the original impulse to write poems. Poets around me were trying too hard to imitate their immediate predecessors, were too keen to keep up with current fashions, what Valery calls “painstaking embellishments,” all of which leads to a lack of connection to the reader. I’d like to be able to say I did not employ painstaking embellishments, but as I saw which poems got published, which poets won prizes, I became obsessed with novelty and bells and whistles. I wanted to embody what one of my heroes, Allen Ginsberg, called candor; I wanted to give Too Much Information. But TMI was out of fashion; what was in fashion was aloof disengagement. I wanted to write a poem that told a story, any story, or was about feeling, any feeling. To do so during this time was to engage in a kind of pornography. I remember one reading where a Big Journal Editor mentioned E.M. Forster’s famous quote from Howard’s End, how writers should “only connect” and “live in fragments no longer,” and how the Big Journal Editor giggled at these antiquated notions. Other New York Poets giggled as well.

I knew whatever poems I would write from these initial impulses would never go anywhere. But I still loved the tactile putting-together of poems, any poems, how words slap up against each other, how sentences sound. So I became a mimic, lived in fragments, forged together lines like everyone else was doing, played word games, engaged in what Keats calls “unpleasantness without exciting any momentous depth of speculation,” and crossed my fingers, hoped I would pass as one of them.

As long as I stayed in New York, it seems, I did.