 Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way. |
| As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery. |
| 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. |
| My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. |
| Many of my poems are not sexual. |
| 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 don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home. |
| 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 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help. |
| We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
