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.

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.

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

To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.