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

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.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

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.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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.

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.