Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

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.

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.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.