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

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.

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

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.

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

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

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.