Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

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.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

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

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.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.