 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. |
| Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back. |
| You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. |
| With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. |
| 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. |
| I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. |
| If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable. |
| The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. |
| The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times. |
| Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. |
| Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing. |
| I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt. |
| I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of 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. |
| I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry. |
| Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity. |
