To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

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

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

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

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

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.

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.