In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

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.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

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.