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.
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
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.
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
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.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
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 was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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.
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.
