A Poet Trains Himself To Stand Out

What You Have To Realize When You Write Poetry, Or If You Love Poetry, Is That Poetry Is Just Naturally The Greatest God Damn Thing That Ever Was In The Whole Universe

I Think Ginsberg Has Done More Harm To The Craft That I Honor And Live By Than Anybody Else By Reducing It To A Kind Of Mean That Enables The Most Dubious Practitioners To Claim They Are Poets Because They Think, If The Kind Of Thing Ginsberg Does Is Poetry, I Can Do That.

There Are So Many Selves In Everybody, And Just To Explore And Exploit One Is Wrong, Dead Wrong, For The Creative Person.

We've Always Had A Tradition In America Of Hounding Our Artists To Death. Look At The List Of Our Great Artists, You See A Continual History Of Defeat, Frustration, Poverty, Alcoholism, Drug Addiction. The Best Poets Of My Generation Are All Suicides.

To Have Guilt You've Got To Earn Guilt, But Sometimes When You Earn It, You Don't Feel The Guilt You Ought To Have. And That's What The Firebombing Is About.