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

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

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

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

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.