Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

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

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 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.

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

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