 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. |
| The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. |
| Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. |
| I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. |
| Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start. |
| One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. |
| Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. |
| I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry. |
| I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else. |
| I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. |
| 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. |
| It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. |
| Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. |
| I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction. |
| 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. |
| Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. |
