Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

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.

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

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

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

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

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.