"He gave me assignments. He told me what I needed to read in order to be a poet. Secondly, the problem with my poetry was that I had fallen in love with William Butler Yeats: I thought he was the greatest poet --and still do-- of all time. The problem was, I was a 25 year old kid writing as if I was, you know, William Butler Yeats. [But] I didn't have the wealth of experience or depth of insight to pull it off. So [Allen Ginsberg] gave me assignments to write from I: What do you remember? What did you see? What was the color of the sky? Where were your hands when you thought this? What color dress was she wearing? Precise details. His idea was that I needed to learn how to become my own dictationist, to learn how to transcribe my own sense impressions. Third, he sensed that I had a reservoir of emotions that I had frozen. I had squelched them in many ways, I was afraid of exposing them. I tended to be a body that carried my brain from room to room--I dealt with everything intellectually. So he began by asking me questions that I could only answer from my heart. And by that experience of answering out of that place over and over again, the actual, literal experience of doing that is what gave me my self. He gave me the gift of myself."

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http://www.naropa.edu/news/articles/elephant_fall2006_lres.pdf