When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

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

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

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.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.