I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

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.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.