I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes...
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient that it...
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We...
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make...
A poem in form still has to have voice gesture a sense of discovery a...
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can...
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the...
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years....
Some people swear by writing courses but whether it really helps American...
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young...
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important...
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers...
Poetry almost by definition calls attention to its language and form.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets...
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several...
The great watershed of modern poetry is French more than English.
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern...
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I...
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry...
If a poem is not memorable there's probably something wrong. One of the...
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences...
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible...
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe...
A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher though awakens your own expectations.
