I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

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.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

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

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

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

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.