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" Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity. "

" 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. "

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

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

" In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible. "

" I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person. "

" 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. "

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

" Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques. "

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

" In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice. "

" 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. "

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

" I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing. "

" I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. "

" 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. "