With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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.