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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "