I Don’t Believe That A Reviewer Or

Detachment Produces A Peculiar State Of Mind. Maybe That's The Worst Sentence Of All, To Be Deprived Of Feeling What A Human Being Ought To Be Entitled To Feel.

If It Were Thought That Anything I Wrote Was Influenced By Robert Frost, I Would Take That Particular Piece Of Mine, Shred It, And Flush It Down The Toilet, Hoping Not To Clog The Pipes.

I Think Ginsberg Has Done More Harm To The Craft That I Honor And Live By Than Anybody Else By Reducing It To A Kind Of Mean That Enables The Most Dubious Practitioners To Claim They Are Poets Because They Think, If The Kind Of Thing Ginsberg Does Is Poetry, I Can Do That.

A Poet Trains Himself To Stand Out In A Storm And Be Struck By Lightning. If He Is Lucky Enough To Be Struck Six Times, He Becomes Immortal. Randall Jarrell Said It And He's Right.

We've Always Had A Tradition In America Of Hounding Our Artists To Death. Look At The List Of Our Great Artists, You See A Continual History Of Defeat, Frustration, Poverty, Alcoholism, Drug Addiction. The Best Poets Of My Generation Are All Suicides.