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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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