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.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

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.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

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

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.

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.