A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It’s also an influence in the way you see everything – in the way you feel your life.
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.
As humans we look at things and think about what we’ve looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
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 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 work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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.
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.