I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

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.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.