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" Many of my poems are not sexual. "

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" When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to. "

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" 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! "

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" 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. "

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Self-Destructive

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

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

" I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex. "

" When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets. "

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

" 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. "

" My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand. "

" 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. "