I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

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.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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

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.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.