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.
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.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We don’t know a tenth of what there is to know, Mr. Pendergast said. Why we don’t even know a sixth.