I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

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.

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

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

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.