I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels - children and poets both tend to feel.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.