The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.

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

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

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

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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.