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 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 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.
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 don’t know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
We control the content of our dreams.
Ginsberg’s Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
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.
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.
I haven’t written anything in four years. I’m sort of dried up.
One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.
Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
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 was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.