When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

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.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

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

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

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

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.