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

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" 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 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. "

" 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. "

" I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that. "