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

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.