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

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.

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.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

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

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.