Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.