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.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

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.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

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.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.