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.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my 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.

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.

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 great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.