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.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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 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.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.