We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.