Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.
One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
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.
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 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 great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
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.
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
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.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
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.
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
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.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me.
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.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
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