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

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

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

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.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.