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.

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.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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 don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.