I hardly ever look at my published books.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

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.

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.

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.

I hardly ever look at my published books.