My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

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.

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.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

One is always nearer by not keeping still.