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

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

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.

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.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

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.