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. Votes: 23
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. Votes: 16
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. Votes: 16
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre. Votes: 14
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. Votes: 13
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! Votes: 11
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help. Votes: 10
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way. Votes: 10
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. Votes: 8
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. Votes: 7
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. Votes: 7
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home. Votes: 7
One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward. Votes: 7
As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery. Votes: 6
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. Votes: 6
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. Votes: 6
How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night. Votes: 6
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. Votes: 4
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly. Votes: 3
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. Votes: 3
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. Votes: 2
I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up. Votes: 2
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. Votes: 2
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. Votes: 2
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. Votes: 2
As if hands were enoughTo hold an avalanche off." Votes: 1
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse. Votes: 1
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. Votes: 0
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off. Votes: 0
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. Votes: 0
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects. Votes: 0
I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has Votes: 0
Many of my poems are not sexual. Votes: 0
Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes. Votes: 0
One is always nearer by not keeping still, Votes: 0
The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin. Votes: 0
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. Votes: 0
We control the content of our dreams. Votes: 0