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

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

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

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