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.

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.

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.

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

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