But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction and I would not have predicted that.

Some people swear by writing courses but whether it really helps American poetry I have doubts.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Unfortunately poetry is not born in noise in crowds or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.