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

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" 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. "

" Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners. "

" 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. "

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

" The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. "

" I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. "

" What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it. "

" Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. "

" It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. "

" I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. "

" I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do. "

" The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry. "

" Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing. "

" Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form. "

" If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me. "

" I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction. "

" Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. "

" I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. "

" Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. "

" 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. "

" With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. "