I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.