The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

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

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.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

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.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.