If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.