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

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

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

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

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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

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.