Computers and writing

Frederick Seidel (in the Paris Review 190, page 163): "It's my feeling that working on the computer puts less distance between me and the poem I'm writing than my own handwriting does. The computer is nearly transparent to me. The more important thing is that it allows me to see the poem on the screen and, immediately after, on the printed-out page, much more quickly than when I was using a typewriter. I revise endlessly, and print the poem out as it progresses hundreds of times. How the lines look, how the stanzas look to the eye, is an important part of weighing them, hearing them, getting them to balance properly."