One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

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.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

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.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

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

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.