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.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.