What Actually Makes Poetry Poetry Is Of

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 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.

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.

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 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.