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" In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. "

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

" It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. "

" 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. "

" With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. "

" The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else. "

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

" Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. "

" 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. "

" Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. "

The Most Important

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