The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

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

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

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.

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

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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.