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

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.

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.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.