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

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.

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.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

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

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

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.