There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

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

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.

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

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.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

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.