I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

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.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

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

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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.