The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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