I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago when books of poems were best-sellers.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

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.

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

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

To this day I don't ever remember seeing a pet inside Moscow I never saw anyone carrying a dog or leading a dog. Err I finally saw a a pet some years later in Kiev so I thought that life must have been different.