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.

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.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

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.