There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew.