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

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" 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. "

" I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. "

" I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. "

" I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems. "

" You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. "

" Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. "

" I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction. "

" 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. "

" In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible. "

" A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. "

" The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "