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

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

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

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.

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.