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

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

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.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

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

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.