The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

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.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

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.

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.