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

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American 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.

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.

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

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.