I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being... Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.

life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that's the miracle -

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. you’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

I broke that town in half like a wooden match.