“Housman's reference to the hairs rising at the back of one's neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.”

On having been a precocious child: “Of course, what precocity gave, socialization took away, and I hope the rather nasty designation ‘precocious child’ faded away before (at least!) adolescence.”

“Lowell, who was the most exhaustingly literary person I’d ever met, I’ve always considered the master of rhetoric. He told me once that he worked over a line ‘until it sounds like Lowell.’”

“All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso's goat isn't a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?”

“If one has to write poorly before one can write well . . . and if that can be extended to read that one has to write deplorably before one can write extraordinarily well, then I definitely started in the right place for the latter.”

On being called for congratulations by Jack Kerouac after beating him out for the Prix de Rome: “I was abroad at the time, but he was, my parents wrote me, genial and sincere and a little high.”

“Literature is not different from life, it is part of life. And for someone like myself, The Odyssey is as much a part of nature as the Aegean.”

“I like . . . those pockets of genuine strangeness within nations. Yet those are being emptied, turned inside out, made to conform—in the interest of what?”

is a bowl of stars,
not the sunset’s wussy Pink Lady
hours ago, before a solitary dinner—

Hollow as promises, their petals blasted,
Their bristled leaves now paned by parasites, 
Their huge, black catacombs all drooping

Very simple love that believes in words,
since I cannot do what I want to do,
can neither hug nor kiss you,

   Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
    There was the turkey, the second-best

Chott

Through the tent flap, across the air mattress, up over my shoulder blade, 
The blindfold of sunlight slips into place. On your borrowed Walkman

 

The faintly digital click of the overhead fan
         stroking what was left of the dark
     had finally given way to a rooster alarm

And what if now I told you this, let’s say,
By telephone. Would you imagine me
Talking to myself in an empty room,