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

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

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

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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

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.

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.