Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

One does not become a guru by accident.