from an unpublished interview:

...Have i ceased to have patience for the unmistakeable
cue, or have i sharpened my observance of ever more
subtle beginning-traces. I don't know.

There's times i know i shouldn't try to write. I know
it's going to be terrible if i don't give up, but i
go ahead anyway because i'm curious as to what will
happen. Well, the poem turns out bad alright, but for
the moment i've satisfied my curiosity.

Everyone who creates finds that parts of their work
and portions of their lives seem finer and more profound
than the rest of it; and they would give anything to
increase their share of that bounty. The trouble is,
you can't. There's nothing you can do. What kind of
artist you are capable of becoming depends on how you
choose to deal with this rude and imperious paradox.

The greater mass of [my writing] i never try to
publish, and i hope some overly kind editor will not
someday put them into a book next to the poems that
are worth something. If that happens i am going to
be an implacable and howling vengeful ghost.

After writing for many years, you've made all the
big easy discoveries and you come to a kind of
watershed. There's the temptation to continue what
you already know how to do well--and this is the road
of self-pastiche. Or you go looking for exotic subject
matter to renew your sense of novelty. Or (and i think
this is best) you will be forced to turn inward and
seek out the sources of your own creativity. I can
only liken this to the difference between a long term
relationship that takes you on an unending journey
of mutual exploration, and the kind of short term
affair that relies on an excitement that soon fizzles
out. I don't know where it leads but i know i can never
be limited to the purely lyric mode again...

I am not one of those who can comfortably accept
that the waste and inequity of the present system is
the best humans can hope for on this planet. But the
emotion of this is rather banal. It manifests in my
work more subtly--as an aesthetic of restlessness,
self-contradiction, and a tendency to evade the
expected.

More and more, obliquely, by implication or allusion,
describing a partial arc in the air; i find that
the presence of my other poems completes the new
one.

What poem did you submit to Pinsky's "favorite
poem" survey? --The "Sonnet to Orpheus" which
begins: 'Silent friend of far-flung distances...'

What American poet did you nominate for the
postage stamp, and what was their response?
--Léonie Adams. They said there was no such poet.

There are more poets now than have ever existed in the
history of language, put together. You might say that
the old paradigm, which was based on a scarcity
economy, can no longer begin to cope with a situation
in which the typical poetry magazine of maybe 100 or
200 subscribers, receives ten times that many submissions
in one week. So perhaps poetry has already turned into
a hobbyist-subculture, or rather a whole set of them
(each claiming to be the ONE TRUE WAY): and we need
to see what can be done within those pared-down domains,
that doesn't depend on getting published as the final
sanction and goal of writing. After all, it hasn't always
been that other way, either; in Shakespeare's day, arguably
the English language's richest and most fertile period,
poems went around from friend to friend and were copied
out in longhand, and that was it. A serious person used
Latin.