It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

Ginsberg’s Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn’t write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

We control the content of our dreams.

I don’t think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

As humans we look at things and think about what we’ve looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don’t want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

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.

I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn’t directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other.

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.

I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it’s too easy to write about my last trick or something. It’s not very interesting to the reader.

While I don’t satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I’m terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that’s true about many of us.

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

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 don’t know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the ’60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I haven’t written anything in four years. I’m sort of dried up.

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.

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

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