From the Paris Review, Robert Creeley, The Art of Poetry No. 10:

When you first took LSD did you have any problem? 

CREELEY 

I had a momentary one, when I remember at one point I did enter the dualism which is “yes-no,” that binary factor. I felt it was going to be absolutely awful. I had just said something such as “this is the case” and I suddenly had an intensive experience of “this is the case—this is not the case—this is the case . . .” It was like seeing a vast checkerboard—that kind of alternating situation. Then I just, by grace of something, stepped out of it. Just stepped out. In the second experience with it, last summer, blessedly that never occurred. All through that second LSD experience I had Donovan's “There Is a Mountain.” I had a pleasant younger friend, and we'd taken it about two in the morning. We had a fire burning, and we were in a place in New England. The day broke clear and fresh and dewy, and there was all this moisture in the trees and the grass—these spider webs of moisture, and it was just idyllic. The whole tone of the house changed. The children had obviously neither concern nor interest nor knowledge that we were on LSD, but somehow the feeling went through the whole house, so that the girls walked down to a store, maybe a mile away, and bought us a chocolate cake. They also spent about an hour and a half that morning making a necklace of pinecones which they gave Bobbie, my wife. The cats and our dog were, you know, almost ravenous for us. The cats were crawling all over us. It wasn't just our hallucinating and thinking they were; they were with us every moment—intensively, rubbing up against us and purring. Then the fire in the fireplace, that light, beautiful light; then seeing the dawn come up back of us as the room began to transform into the day . . .  

INTERVIEWER 

What do you think is the effect of hallucinatory drugs on the creative process? 

CREELEY 

Terrific! That's at least what I'd like to say. Things had been so uptight, almost for a year—writing, really our marriage as well, just a stale sense of effort and also confusions of feeling older. I think a lot, and at times I can box myself in with all the rationale of army logistics. It can get to be a hopeless logjam. So anyhow the LSD just wiped that out—and fears and tentativenesses and senses of getting lost or of being endlessly separated from the world, all that just went. I can't claim perhaps so simply that writing was thereby opened but I do know the past year has felt a very active one in consequence. The thing is, it's information—extraordinary and deeply relieving information. Just as if one were to hear that the war was over, that some imminent peril and/or bitter waste of time had stopped. Of course, there's no need to be told this over and over; that is, I don't myself feel much need to take the drug every day. It's a vision of a life, all life—and obviously that's a lot to be given by anything or anyone, and so one's not done with it, so to speak, in a day.