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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

The Most Important

" 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. "

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