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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.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
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.
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.
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.