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

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

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

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

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

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

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.