The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

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

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

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.