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

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

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.

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.

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

I haven’t written anything in four years. I’m sort of dried up

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading

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

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly

My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand

I don’t know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home

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.

As humans we look at things and think about what we’ve looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery

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

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre

Ginsberg’s Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady

Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help

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!

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

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward

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

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

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

We control the content of our dreams.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way