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

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

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

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.