[Q] Has reading fiction in your time had an effect on your writing, on your thinking about writing?

I think it must have because... I think fiction must have affected me often in one way or another. I remember that when I was writing my first adolescent efforts I found the prose of James Agee in his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men very contagious, as contagious as the Hart Crane I was then reading. I'm not sure what other writers I could come up with right now. Saul Bellow writes the kind of prose that a poet delights to read. Well, many people delight to read Saul Bellow, but the special thing about him is that he writes with all his languages at once. He writes like someone who knows his Nietzsche and who knows his Church Fathers, someone who has taught seminars in the classics. At the same time, he writes like somebody who knows how to talk to just anybody on the streets of Chicago. I think of poetry as an effort to express, to find words for everything that you perceive, everything that's in your experience, and also to give voice to your various selves, to let them all talk at once, if you possibly can, and Bellow is the kind of writer of prose, who inclines you to try to do that in poetry. There must be other fiction writers I could think of, but I don't think of them just now. Mostly, I think I am moved by either actual situations or by the poems of others.