Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

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.

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

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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.