I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

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

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

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

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.

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

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.