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 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.

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

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

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

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

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.