The Fact That Something Is In A

Young Writers Only Take Off When They Find Their Subjects. Since Almost Everyone Has A Family And Stories About Family, That Is Often A Place To Start.

What Actually Makes Poetry Poetry Is Of Course Impossible To Define. We Recognize It When We Hear It, When We See It, But We Can't Define It.

It Was Less A Literary Thing Than A Linguistic, Philosophical Preoccupation... Discovering How Far You Can Go With Language To Create Immediate, Elementary Experience.

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.

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.