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" The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

The Most Important

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

" The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. "

" 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. "

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