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.

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

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

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

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

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.