I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

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.

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

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.

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

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.