We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.