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.

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.

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

life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.