I Write As A Way Of Keeping

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 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.

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.

The Fact That Something Is In A Rhymed Form Or In Blank Verse Will Not Make It Good Poetry.

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.