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

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

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.

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.

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.