The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

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.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.