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.

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

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.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

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.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.