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

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

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

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.