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.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

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