Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

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

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

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.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

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

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.