Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

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.

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

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.