I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.