"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."

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

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

"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."

"Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own."

"You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination."

"Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'"

"I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir."