I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.

It’s very hard to write humor.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

I certainly can’t speak for all cultures or all societies, but it’s clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It’s not part of the cultural mainstream.

And Robert Lowell, of course – in his poems, we’re not located in his actual life. We’re located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.

The future is always beginning now.

Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

I tend to like poems that engage me – that is to say, which do not bore me.

There’s a certain point, when you’re writing autobiographical stuff, where you don’t want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious – never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Each moment is a place you’ve never been.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.