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

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.

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

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.

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.