I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

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.

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

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

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.

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