Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.