I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.