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

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

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.

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

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.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.