American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.