I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.

I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.