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" Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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