Pastoral Resources

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

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.

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

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've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.