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.

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

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.

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

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

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