Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.