If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

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

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.

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

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

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

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.