Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.
I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
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.
The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.