In The Best Fiction, The Language Itself

Fiction Is About Intimacy With Characters, Events, Places.

With Prose You Can Incorporate More Details, Develop Scenes, Sustain The Tension In A Special Way. Prose Has Its Own Speed.

A Poem In Form Still Has To Have Voice, Gesture, A Sense Of Discovery, A Metaphoric Connection, As Any Poetry Does.

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.

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.