Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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

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.