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.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

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.

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.

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.

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

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