Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

It's very hard to write humor.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.