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

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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.

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.

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

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

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