Today’s program presents poems by three of the poets whose works were essential influences in the earliest stages of my writing. They include the early William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell in Lord Weary’s Castle, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in A Coney Island of the Mind. I end my program with two of my own poems, one from my “Ferlinghetti stage” (written in 1968) and one from my “Lowell stage” (written in 1969).