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

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.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

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.

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 think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

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