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" I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. "

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" 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. "

" The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times. "

" Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back. "

" 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. "

" We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people. "

" If people associate me with a region, that's fine with me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. "

" I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing. "

" Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners. "

" Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. "

" 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. "

" When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture. "

" Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing. "

" I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse. "

" Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts. "

" Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. "

" Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques. "

" One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person. "

" Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity. "

" 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. "