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.

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

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

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

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

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