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

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

" 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. "

" A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

The Most Important

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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