The Great Watershed Of Modern Poetry Is

I Don't Think The Creative Writing Industry Has Helped American Poetry.

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.

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.

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.

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.