Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.