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.

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

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

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.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

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

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.