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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
• 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.
• 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 think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
• Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.