I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

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.

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